Do You Know These Quotes? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Woody Allen

Woody Allen has had a career spanning entertainment media in a variety of forms, which began in 1950. He has been a film maker, actor, writer, and a comedian. He has been most active as a film maker, with a remarkable span throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s of producing one film per year.

In "Movies and the Meaning of Life", a book written by Kimberly A. Blessing, she does site this specific quote. Specifically, Blessing states, 'The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions,' said the existentialist thinker Albert Camus. And no less a philosopher than Woody Allen has wondered: 'How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?' He wrote this in ""My Speech to the Graduates" (1979) to help illustrate the difficulty in finding the meaning of life.

Answer: Kobayashi Issa

Kobayashi Issa was an eighteenth century Japanese Haiku poet. He is better known in general as just 'Issa', which literally translates into 'cup of tea' in English. He produced written works consistently throughout his 64 year lifespan.


The First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, in its "Seedbeds and Worms" talk put on by Reverend David Breeden, actually cites this very quote, along with Issa himself, in the "Floating Downriver" chapter. Issa originally penned the quote in "A Box of Zen: Haiku the Poetry of Zen".

Answer: John Donne

Donne wrote this line in "Meditation XVII" which he wrote in 1623. Later, this became the basis for 1940 book "For Whom The Bell Tolls" published by Ernest Hemingway. The line essentially suggests that things which happen to one person impact an entire community. Specifically, it highlights everyone's morality and literally tells us that the death of one impacts everyone.

Donne was an English poet, priest and lawyer who lived from 1571-1631. He was no stranger to conflict, as he was born into a recusant Catholic family who openly opposed the Church of England.

Answer: Eric Roth

Coming up with good lines and well written dialogue is something that was second nature to Eric Roth, with his decorated resume. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay six times in his career, with Forrest Gump unsurprisingly being the focal point of this on occasion, being responsible for him winning this award once.

Eric Roth, a busy and very active writer, began his career in 1970 and continued it into the 2020s. In 2026, he debuted as a playwright with his adaptation of "High Noon." Roth, interestingly, is known for creating script using a tool called Movie Master. Movie Master notably is an entirely offline tool, devoid of Internet access. Fitfully, Roth produced the scripts physically, and never distributed them digitally.

Answer: L. Frank Baum

In 1939, the first theatrical production of "The Wizard of Oz" came out. The attached quote depicts Dorothy's initial reaction to ending up in Oz after a vicious tornado swept her, her dog, and her home away.

L. Frank Baum was primarily a children's author, who specialized in fantasy texts for children like "The Wizard of Oz". In his entire career, L. Frank Baum published 41 other novels, with 14 of them being based in the same universe as "The Wizard of Oz", 83 short stories, and just over 200 poems.

Answer: Mark Twain

While statistics are valuable and serve as a helpful guideline to many functions across life, this observation from Twain highlights that blindly following numbers without nuance is folly. Doing so can and often will mislead people.

This quote specifically appears in the 1924 "Autobiography of Mark Twain." For Twain himself, he was a legendary American writer who published numerous timeless titles such as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." He was active right up until the day of his passing in 1910, aged 74 years old.

Answer: Jesus of Nazareth

Jesus of Nazareth, a relatively well known figure within the Christian religion, was a Jewish preacher and major religious leader in the Roman province of Judaea. Most Christians consider Jesus to be the incarnation of God.

The listed quote can be found in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25. It is written that Jesus initially said this quote when a young rich man asked him what he would need to do to enter Heaven.

Answer: Lord Kelvin

Lord Kelvin is, indeed, the metric in which absolute temperatures are stated. In life, Lord Kelvin was a mid nineteenth - early twentieth century British mathematician, physicist, and engineer. He was also a professor at the University of Glasglow for over 50 years.

Kelvin made this claim in 1895 through the Australian Institute of Physics, eight years before the first airplane would indeed take flight and thoroughly proved him wrong.

Answer: William Shakespeare

This line is spoken and written in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's famous "Romeo and Juliet." The line is spoken by Juliet, when she is lamenting Romeo's status as a Montague, and that his family name prevents the two from seriously pursuing a romance together, since the Capulets and Montagues were majorly opposed to one another.

William Shakespeare is a legendary writer from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to the ever iconic "Romeo and Juliet", Shakespeare is also responsible for works such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", and "Hamlet", the latter being one of the most quoted and referenced texts over time in human history.

Answer: James Joyce

James Joyce was an Irish author, poet, and infamous literary critic. He is also thought of as majorly influential in the writing industry in general during the twentieth century. He was most well known for a collection of stories, some examples being "Dubliners", "Exiles", and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

The aforementioned quote originates from the first line in Joyce's short story "A Painful Case", which came out in 1914. The quote itself essentially depicts a man who is disconnected from his own senses, feelings, and life, yet physically remains alive, a walking husk in a manner of speaking