Peter De Vries Quotes - Page 2

We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.

A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

Marriage has driven more than one man to sex.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

We are nothing but a string of gut on a stick of bone riding this piece of astral soot for one piteous splinter of eternity.

There are times when breakfast seems the one thing worth getting up for.

Sex in marriage is like medicine. Three times a day for the first week. Then once a day for another week. Then once every three or four days till the condition clears up.

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.

The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.

He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.

I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds - they mature slowly.

Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.