OXYMORONIC QUOTES
Key: "Quote" [author] | [source issue] | original source

"Education: that which reveals to the wise—and conceals from the stupid—the vast limits of their knowledge."

[Mark Twain] | [1.2]


"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."

[Lao Tzu] | [1.3] | from Tao Te Ching


"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."

[Abraham Lincoln] | [1.4]


"They always talk who never think, and who have the least to say."

[Matthew Prior] | [1.12]


"Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery."

[Cicero] | [1.15] | from De Republica


"We love what we should scorn if we were wiser."

[Marie de France] | [1.16]


"A woman is more responsive to a man’s forgetfulness than to his attentions."

[Jules Janin] | [1.16]


"In love, victory goes to the man who runs away."

[Napoleon Bonaparte] | [1.16]


"Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad."

[Victor Hugo] | [1.19]


"Poverty is hateful good."

[Geoffrey Chaucer] | [1.19] | from The Canterbury Tales


"Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well."

[Shakespeare] | [1.19] | King Lear, I.iv.226


"Several excuses are always less convincing than one."

[Aldous Huxley] | [1.19] | from Point Counter Point


"Life is too important to be taken seriously."

[Oscar Wilde] | [1.20]


"Never take anybody’s advice."

[George Bernard Shaw] | [1.20]


"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."

[Jonathan Swift] | [1.20]


"Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace."

[Arthur Conan Doyle] | [QoM] | from “A Case of Identity” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes


"The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today."

[Lewis Carroll] | [QoM] | Through the Looking Glass