Piet Hein Quotes

The way to grow grand is not: to demand. In life's every field you are what you yield.

It isn't enough to exasperate others. You have to remember to gladden yourself!

DREAM INTERPRETATION Simplified.

Everything's either
concave or -vex,
so whatever you dream
will be something with sex.

Those who always
know what’s best
are
a universal pest.

Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily — physically or mentally — around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better.

ON PROBLEMS

Our choicest plans
have fallen through,
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.

ASTRO-GYMNASTICS

Go on a starlit night,
stand on your head,
leave your feet dangling
outwards into space,
and let the starry
firmament you tread
be, for the moment,
your elected base.

Feel Earth's colossal weight
of ice and granite,
of molten magma,
water, iron, and lead;
and briefly hold
this strangely solid planet
balanced upon
your strangely solid head.

if you possess more than just eight things then y o u are possessed by t h e m

VITA BREVIS

A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people to get what there is of it
wrong.

Shun advice at any price - that's what I call good advice.

Love while you've got love to give.
Live while you've got life to live.

WHAT PEOPLE MAY THINK

Some people cower
and wince and shrink,
owing to fear of
what people may think.
There is one answer
to worries like these:
people may think
what the devil they please.

WHO IS LEARNED? A definition

One who, consuming midnight oil
in studies diligent and slow,
teaches himself, with painful toil,
the things that other people know.

Knowing what
Thou knowest not
Is in a sense
Omniscience.

MAKING AN EFFORT
Our so-called limitations, I believe,
apply to faculties we don't apply.
We don't discover what we can't achieve
until we make an effort not to try.