Bauvard Quotes

I have never sought to displease; I merely seek pleasure and avoid the pain it causes those who work to produce it. That is what it means to live by the leisure principle.

As a captain whose vessel is about to crash on the rocks empties its souls of doubt, so are the hesitant useful for throwing off of an enterprise nearing its end: blame must be cast in failure, profits divided easily in success.

Don't take drugs. Asking politely promotes healthy stereotypes.

Quote: a banal proverb that is considered profound when uttered by a celebrity.

I compensate for my debauchery by being brilliant at it. I make sacrifices for it by waking up in a gutter covered in the fruits of my genius.

Attacking the person instead of the argument is condemned in logic, widespread in physics, and not used nearly enough in humanism.

Don't swallow: your bulging, blushing cheeks display the saliva you want to share.

Bragging about your compassion is the first step towards feeling a genuine emotion.

Trees are corrupting our parks. They should be arrested for loitering. For deciduous trees, add littering and indecent exposure to that list of offenses.

When cultivating your garden, keep the soil healthy with encroachers. The most redolent flowers grow over graves.

Every child that receives life advice should keep in mind that in every parent's past, there's leftover booze and contraceptives.

Humor is not an end in itself, but a tool to understanding. A dense head must be tickled with an ax.

You can always tell the quality of an author by their cover picture. Bad writers bear an idiotic smile on the inside flap. Great writers take up the entire back cover looking slightly mad, sad, or bored. The very best writers, though, had the superior ability to die before photography was invented.

I get a lot of big ideas, and occasionally I actually come up with one myself.

Rioter: a person who wants dinner, and needs a TV to eat it with.

There are lots of things sons shouldn't imagine about their mothers, above all what it was like to become one.

When a person encounters his own statue and takes a hammer to it, performance art adds depth to greatness.

Somewhere in the background of magnificence lurks the kitchen staff. But a magnificent person only forgets about his origins, never his brunch.

I don't believe in a lot of phenomena that fall under the term 'parapsychology.' Especially that one branch, psychology. You're going to tell me there's something inside my head, controlling me?

Liver failure is the easiest way to say 'no' to alcohol.

Have a baby shower, then an abortion. Now you just have to lose a little weight to squeeze into all your skimpy new outfits.

Sending love letters to first-graders will teach them lessons in cursive. But writing back will test their commitment.

I happen to find ceilings much lovelier than the night sky myself. Sometimes I just stare at them for hours and wonder what could be up there.

An empty skull is the vanitas symbol of modern education.

Folk wisdom: quaint sayings of urban sophisticates compiled from the suburbs.

When it's not enough to veto your children's tendencies, you must in vitro them.

Usually I am the only subject I care to discuss with company. But when I'm getting reacquainted with an old friend, I really enjoy just sitting back and listening to them talk about me for a while.

Use condoms; it's wise not to gamble with your children's future.

It is a known fact that pain and pleasure are the two most basic elements of life. But the secret is to simplify that fact.

I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

Where does love reveal itself? In beds, sofas, bathtubs – each section of a department store has its advantages.

First people lose their hair, then their vices, then their motivation. Then a toupee brings it all flowing back.

Pure joy is rare. That's why for every meal I eat a really bloody steak.

Men only treat women like princesses when they want to use them like prostitutes.

Be true to your divided selves. They're the only ones who will support you in moments of vacillation.

The French: a people who have used their sophisticated culture and beautiful language to bequeath to the world the sliced potato.

I don't believe in failure. I'm perseverant - I believe in failing.

The only way to be completely self-consistent is to be constantly uttering paradoxes.

I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains.

The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence.

What's outside my head and what's inside my head aren't worth mentioning. What's worth mentioning is what's on my head – my hair. Whatever happens, I'll still be as fashionably coiffed as I was before the war broke out and I got dementia.

Just relax. Everyone around you is working too hard.

Flatterers should be mistrusted, especially when they praise the dead. To seek a place in society is self-serving, but to seek one in history affects everyone.

Embarrassing facts, those would really help our children remember their classroom lessons better.

Sympathy is why when a man is getting mugged, you let him keep his shirt after you take his life. Funerals are respectable affairs, after all.

A ransom note, the true test of unconditional love.

We need to revitalize the American spirit. People are always asking 'What would the founding fathers do,' but I have yet to witness a single séance.

When one's unconscious is full of vice, nothing realizes inner potential like hypocrisy.

When someone gives me either a democratic or republican pamphlet, I throw it in their face. I'm a librarian, damn it! We only take book donations.

I ran into an old friend on the street and we started up a conversation. Four hours and six bottles of wine later, we decided the weather was just too unpredictable, and we parted ways.

Political debate: when charlatans come together to discuss their principles.

Welcome to Telepathics Anonymous. Don't bother introducing yourself.

Envy is for people who don't have the self-esteem to be jealous.

Cannibal: epicures who abstain from alcohol and tobacco. As moral guides, they are underutilized in the police forces of modern societies.

Inconsistent parenting creates confusion. When I'm pitting mom against dad, they never know what to expect.

Divorce runs high these days, but I'm an exception to the norm. I got divorced when marriage was still popular.

One nation, under God, with consciousness – the practical man serves the highest abstraction with juggling training.

Einstein's remark on the limitlessness of human stupidity is made even more disturbing by the discovery that infinity comes in different sizes. Answering 'How much stupider?' or trying to measure the minimal idiocy bounded by an IQ test are mysteries which are themselves infinitely less alarming than simply attempting to tally the anti-savant population. One can count all the natural idiots (they're the same as the even number of idiots – twice as many), but the number of real idiots continues forever: all the counting idiots (finger reckoners) plus all the fractional idiots (geniuses on a bad day) plus all the irrational idiots (they go on and on and on) add up to a world in which the approaching upper limit of our set of natural resources has its complement in the inexhaustible lower limit of our set of mental ones.

I don't read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.

Education: learning to find your purpose. Upon finding your purpose: what did I learn?

Hypocrisy is a quality found in others. I am an optimist. I believe that saying the right thing will eventually cause people to do the right thing for me.

The smaller the dinner table, the better the side conversation: you can gossip about the guests without fearing whether you will be overheard. It just isn't good table manners to exclude someone from their own ridicule. That's why the juiciest side conversations occur at a table for one.

When you don't hold your pipe with the proper poise, smoking is very hazardous for your image.

A man is always devoted to something more tangible than a woman - the idea of her.

After all else, there's more yet: I don't know what, though.

Buddhism: a violent religion that has compensated for the exploding human population by causing whole species of animal vessels to go extinct.

One never owns a book. It sits on your shelf in a fine edition like a piece of furniture, and you are its admiring ward until it flies off from you in a time of financial hardship. If it is a tattered paperback, she is your casual mistress you use a few times. If you have read it a hundred times then it is your wife, and a source of infinite mystery.

There is an enduring freshness in what remains strange and obscure which the cliches of greatness can only evoke nostalgia for.

The lampshade on my head is for my bright ideas. I won't be able to convey them until Monday, when my curtain gets out of the dry cleaners.

Teacher: a master who, through personal example, inspires students to rebel against learning.

To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.

Mom always said I was born to sit in the electric chair, but I'm proving her wrong. I'm going to die on my knees, begging for my life.

If you want to change the world, just change yourself. The world needs traitors.

Seize something wonderful; don't lose your chance waiting for it to become legal.

The stoic contemplates fallen leaves; the epicure rakes them into a loveseat.

Religious fasting is the best way to cure an anorexic's spirit: in heaven her condition will be normal.

Moderation: a median with no means, praised by those with no misfortunes, practiced by those with no merits.

It is remarkably precocious when a person accomplishes anything after the age of thirty.

Self-awareness of one's faults, far from being the first step to growth, is very often the second foot in the mud.

Some people won't have kids, but I'm not going to have parents. I'm burning their birth certificates and defacing their gravestones tonight.

Give up your dreams; you'll accomplish more without sleep.

Children should have a balanced diet. They should only consume sugar, salt, and fat in equal quantities.

Spending one's last moments prostrated before the toilet is the supreme act of repentance. It allows one to relieve a heavy inner burden.

Water is very bad for one's health. People in third world countries seem to drink nothing but water, and they are always dying.

We live in one of the few epochs of humanity where life isn't just a painful cycle of toil, fatigue, and collapse. Now pleasure gyrates us through those stages.

It's best to only exercise when the air conditioning is working properly outside. A strong wind ensures one doesn't sweat very much.

I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people's nightmares.

I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I'm heaven's landscape painter.