Dicta Quotes & Sayings

LAW 38
Think As You Like But Behave Like Others
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness. — Robert Greene

It's nice to have something else going on when a book comes out so you're not just sitting by the phone, waiting for things to happen. You don't want to be the guy Googling himself all day. — Jonathan Dee

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth. — Orson Scott Card

I own that it is a good deal of a mystery to me how judges, of all persons in the world, should put their faith in dicta. A brief experience on the bench was enough to reveal to me all sorts of cracks and crevices and loopholes in my own opinions when picked up a few months after delivery and reread with due contrition. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

Only cops and vampires have to have an invitation to enter. — Christopher Moore

Rhiannon's Law #22. You can't lie to yourself, so don't bother trying. Doing so only multiplies your douchebag level to the umpteenth power and confirms what others have been saying for years - that you are an idiot. — J.A. Saare

It will not do merely to listen to great principles. You must apply them in the practical field, turn them into constant practice. What will be the good of cramming the high - sounding dicta of the scriptures? You have first to grasp the teachings of the Shastras, and then to work them out in practical life. Do you understand? This is called practical religion. — Swami Vivekananda

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character
shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the
bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual - her mother did the same. — Harper Lee

For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure. — Tracy Chevalier

Healey's First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging. — Denis Healey

The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. — Murphy's Law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong — Murphy's Law

The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create. — Emma Goldman

Rhiannon's Law #16: If it looks like a rabbit, and it hops like a rabbit, run the other way and fast. That shit is liable to tear you arm off. — J.A. Saare

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought. — Maurice Blanchot

The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up. — Jane Jacobs

LAW 46
Never Appear Too Perfect
Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity. — Robert Greene

I've known the anxiety of being completely lost, flying at night. It can be extreme. You're travelling at close to five hundred miles an hour, and every minute that goes by takes you further into being lost unless you get help from ground radar somewhere or somehow figure out the error. — James Salter

Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. — Robert A. Heinlein

Just do what you like to do, and do it all the time. — Leif Garrett

Smooth words in place of gifts.
[Lat., Dicta docta pro datis.] — Plautus

So many women today have become so focused on their children, they've developed these romantic entanglements with their children's lives, and the husbands are secondary. They're left out. And the romantic focus is on the children. — Ayelet Waldman

I've spent the first part of my life in the shadow of my family. I'm not going to live in the shadow of my husband. — Martha Wainwright

Solomon's Laws
1. When the law doesn't work ... work the law. — Paul Levine

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence. — George MacDonald

Urban survival rule 22: Never annoy an armed man. — Kelley Armstrong

The sleeping brain has eyes that give us light; we can never see our destiny by day. — Aeschylus

any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these acts will elicit Resistance. — Steven Pressfield

Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing, Thanks for mercies past received. — John Sheffield

A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders. — Honore De Balzac

I only know that I can't live without flight. Without sky and moist, breathing earth. — Sophie Jordan

[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.
Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires. — Theophile Gautier

He really your dad? Yes. On my father's side. — Peter Heller