Customer Reviews

If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People?: Smart Quotes for Dumb Times

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have several books of quotes and this is one of my favorites. It is a nice little book to have around for thoughtfulness or just for a laugh. If you like reading quotes, you'll like this book! There are lots of interesting quotes from both modern and classic people

The book is broken down by subject A-Z and includes hundreds of topics and quotes. The table of contents lists all the topics and there is an index of all the people including their birthdates and deathdates and occupation (although in some instances the index page number was incorrect and I was unable to find the particular person). Also, be aware, some quotes may not be appropriate for younger readers.

Here are some samples:

Jerry Seinfeld "Introducing the `Lite'-The new way to spell "Light" but with 20% fewer letters"

Joan Baez "You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy."

Yogi Berra: You can observe a lot by watching.

Joan Rivers "A man can sleep around, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp."

Mark Twain: "The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."

Frank Lloyd Wright: "The truth is more important than the facts."

Mae West "The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond."

Marty Feldman "I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician"

Indira Gandhi "My grandfather one told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there."

Lucille Ball "The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."

Every occasion except reviews. I looked.

I love quote books. There is an amazing amount of wisdom contained in small phrases, and quote books are the kind of books that you can just turn to any page and get something funny, interesting, profound, or quite possibly all three.

And a quote book compiled by one of the guys who wrote Blackadder - where can you go wrong?

Um, I guess you can go wrong, but they didn't. Yay them! This book is divided up alphabetically by topic, like love, drinking, women, etc. There is an index at the end of "quotees" just in case you knew that Charles Kuralt had said something about Highways, but you can't remember what it was. ("Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.")

Oddly, there are four quotes in the potatoes section, but no pie section. If you want the Carl Sagan pie quote, you have to look in the index. ("If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.")

There's a Homer Simpson quote about Clown College.

Besides the quotes, some of the "quotees" even have a little explanation after their quote. The Charles Kuralt quote above mentions his "On the Road" series on CBS.

This is a fun book to have handy. I highly recommend it.

I admire the authors' unwaivering claim that they live their lives for quotes. They pull them from books and interviews with the sole intention of compiling them for others. They must lead "interesting" lives.

As a quote resource this book is very good. The difference between this book and, let's say, a Bartlett's book is that this book has many more contemporary quotes, for now. Ten years from now, the pop-culture quotes will have aged as well.

The quotes are grouped in alphabetical topics and that helps when hopping around to access different subjects.

The only true reason I made this review a 3-star instead of higher is that there is nothing really spectacular or grabbing about this collection. Publishing collections of quotes is a pretty lean field to work in to say the least. This doesn't leave a lot of room for new entries. This is a good book with up to date quotations. But there is nothing spectacular about this gathering that would differentiate it from all the other quote books on the shelf.

When I got this book, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. A book full of quotations? How is that going to work? Well, it doesn't work as a "book" as such. This is not one you can pick up and read half the book in one sitting like a book of fiction. It's a collection of random, often disjointed groupings of quotes about subjects.

They're a wide range of things.. Just a random opening of the book to pages right now shows quotes about apples, dreams, God, legs, misery, sex, television, and war.

There's no attempt to bring them all together in a cohesive thought. There is a prologue (written by Stephen Fry), and a "preamble", but there's no real "Hey, all these quotes put together mean...".

Having said all that, it was a fun book to pick up, find a subject, read a few quotes on. Some made me laugh, some made me think. Some made me say, "Did they REALLY say that?" Either way, I enjoyed the time I spent with this book, and recommend it if you're into this sort of thing.

Like all quotation books, this is a book to be browsed. I like that it's organized alphabetically by subject. I particularly like that dates and professions are included in the authorial index and occasionally, as needed, more detailed info is included in ital under a quote. First, a couple of observations based on an afternoon's browse through an advance reviewers' copy.

There are 15 quotes about America, all of them by men and all of them negative. There are 12 quotes about England, all but one of them by men and all but one of them positive, the exception being the one from the woman who said: "Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife."

There are eight quotes about daughters and this one by Milton is typical: "I will not allow my daughter to learn foreign languages because one tongue is sufficient for a woman." There is no comparable quote category for sons. Did I mention that the authors in their preamble, refer to their selections as "puddles of wisdom" and that the subtitle of the book is "smart quotes for dumb times"? Betcha can't guess the nationality and sex of the authors. That said, here's a sampling of some of my favorites so far...

On Music: "What do you get when you play country music backward? You get your girl back, your dog back, your pick-up back and you stop drinking." --Louis Saaberda

On Awards: "All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one." --Henry Mitchell

On Gardening: "Gardening requires lots of water--most of it in the form of perspiration." --Lou Erickson

On Living: "Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart." --Erma Bombeck

On Men: "Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV." --Jerry Seinfeld.

On Musical Instruments: "It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself." --J. S. Bach

On Stories: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years." --Willa Cather

I work in sales management, and this little tome is a delicious treasure trove of pull-from-the-pocket quotes for pretty much any conversation. Not as dark or sarcastic as the title might imply, most people will find this a witty and approachable compilation of quotations easily dropped in everyday chat. For people in sales or public speaking, there's some real gold on these pages.

This book reminds me of a salt-water taffy. You pop it open, roll it around for a few minutes, then you put it down and can barely remember what it was like when it was there. A collection of mostly non sequitur quotes organized under banner categories like "Drinks." These categories may mean that the quotes are about drinks, or that the quote refers to drinks in some way, without any real rhyme or reason.

Half the problem is the quotes are mostly either nonsense or irrelevant. Most of them are only funny in a malapropism type of way, not having any real wit. Even those the best I would say are only kind of funny. Not Steve Wright funny. More like James Belushi funny.

"If Ignorance Is Bliss: Why Aren't There More Happy People?" is a title that was derived from Victor Cousins quote: "If ignorance is bliss there should be more happy people."

By reading this book you will learn quite a few new ideas. Some of my favorite categories include: Anger, Attitude, Books, Business, Cats, Chocolate, Computers, Dieting, Exercise, Forgiveness, Greatness, Intuition, Joy, Kindness, Laughter, Marriage, Nature, Originality, Pleasure, Questions, Religion, Soul, Technology, Universe, Virtue, Wisdom, Youth and Zen.

The people featured in this book are mostly men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, C.S. Lewis, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Rumi and Plato. Quotes by women are from Dolly Parton, Marilyn Monroe, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen and Mae West.

Most of the quotes in each category were completely new to me. However there were some favorites like: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." by Eleanor Rossevelt.

While I enjoyed most of the book three things did occur to me while reading all the quotes in each category. At times some of the quotes appeared to be thinly veiled political statements to draw the mind into a certain concurrence.

The section on England did seem more complimentary while the quotes in the section on nationalities seemed a bit racist. The section on America is a bit strange with Sigmund Freud saying that America is a mistake. Charlie Chaplin weighs in with: "I have no further use for America. I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ was President." The quotes on marriage also seemed a bit negative.

Besides all that many of the quotes are funny, at times profound and at other times merely freshly amusing. I didn't find any quotes to make me laugh out loud but I did find some to be more than amusing.

I loved Cicero's quote: "Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing." I'm still thinking about Samuel Beckett's: "Nothing is more real than nothing." I'm not sure I really see any wisdom in that particular quote and wouldn't have included it in this book.

A few of the categories like potatoes, shoes and sheep seem out of place. The list of quotes under "predictions" was actually quite funny. Never say something won't happen in your lifetime because it just might, even sooner than you expect.

The beauty of this book is that you don't have to read it all in one setting. I tried reading it over four days and it was pretty intense reading. For light reading you may want to just read one topic at a time once a day, highlighting your favorite quotes so you can read them again more easily than searching through the whole book again. Here are some of my favorites:

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. ~ Rudyard Kipling

One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers a thousand times a thousand on the battlefield." ~ BUDDA

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
~Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

So no matter what topic you happen to choose or if you just read random pages on a whim there is something to learn and to contemplate again and again as you turn to this book filled with unique and mostly unfamiliar quotes.

Here are some other books I loved:

The Quotable Cook

Quantations: A Guide to Quantum Living in the 21st Century

Cat Quotations: A Collection of Lovable Cat Pictures and the Best Cat Quotes

Sundrops on Life: A Book of Good Thoughts

The Whole World Book Of Quotations: Wisdom From Women And Men Around The Globe Throughout The Centuries 3,000 Overlookd Quotations From Abigail Adams To Zoroaster - this is my favorite book of quotes so far.

~The Rebecca Review

Perhaps a by-product of the Internet, it appears that quotes are more popular than ever in mainstream communication.

Despite this seeming phenomena, I might have to strangle someone if I read another moronic quote taken out of context from either a song lyric and/or movie. I doubt either Samuel L. Jackson nor Hilary Duff ever intended to end up on your PowerPoint slide.

It's not as if the other side of spectrum produces much better quotage. Citing obscure 17th Century French Philosophers in your email signature files doesn't make you smarter. Ditto on poor Gandhi and MLK Jr. who - in death - don't have a minute of quotation peace.

'If Ignorance is Bliss,' however, finally gets the whole quote thing right. It avoids the ho-hum of the Bartlett's collections, likewise the stupidity
of non-quotables found on the Internet.

As per its title, this book takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to quotations, one preferring double entendres and allowing for inclusion of contemporary sources, if available. The result is a solid slew of thousands of quotable quips, ones I might actually laugh at if included within the next company slide brief.

Akin to Bartlett's, the layout is alphabetical and based on topic area. Topping the former, however, are its emphasis on small selections of niche topics versus over arching generalizable quotes. What this produces is a very quick ability to find the quote you want...and fast.

Related - and echoing another reviewer's sentiments - I was surprised to discover the absence of female and/or diversity-friendly quotables in this book.

A devil's advocate would argue that the most quotable figure is one with the greatest access to a pulpit to do so. Thus, this flaw might simply be a product of quote reality from the preceding centuries. Not wanting to broach this topic via a quote book, I'll leave it at that.

As a unit, 'If Ignorance Is Bliss' is a fantastic inclusion to any professional, academic, or average Joe/Jane looking to add some clever quips to his/her communication repertoire. A great gift, and easily the best of its genre in recent memory.

And the quotes are all arranged alphabetically by topic, such as "music" and "logic".

It is filled with quotes from way back in history, to some fairly recent ones, covering a wide range of opinions and views.

Not much more to say about it, really - if you're looking for a book full of quotes that you bring up on a variety of topics, this is a great one. Right up there with Bartlett's Quotations, especially since it contains more recent materials than that old (but usable) tome.

I also appreciate that for some of the people quoted, the authors put in little notes about the person, such as "This person has gone through history unknown except for this one quote - no one knows who it is" or to put a little context for a quote's origin.

Excellent, and fun read!