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Rhetoric is the use of words to change the world.
--Michael Drout, A Way with Words, The Art of Rhetoric.
We are today a wired nation, eager and accustomed to instant information where visions of both success and setback in all areas of American life are available immediately online.
--Patricia Grace Smith, Rockets Are Dangerous, Aware of the Hazards, Associate Administrator, Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration.
I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.
--Ernest Hemingway
To determine whether or not you have the ingredients to be charismatic, answer the following questions: What are your real feelings about who you are? What do you believe in? Do you have goals or a mission in life? Do you project optimism? Do others turn to you for leadership? Noncharismatic people spend their lives auditioning for others and hoping they'll be accepted. Charismatic people don't doubt their ability to add value to a situation, so they move forward with their mission.
--Roger Ailes, You Are the Message.
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know until he takes up a pen to write.
--William Makepeace Thackeray
When you find a deal is when you're looking for one.
--Dave Ramsey, The Dave Ramsey Show, July 17, 2007.
After crosses and losses men grow humbler and wiser.
--Benjamin Franklin
True hope is based on the energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs, and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events.
--Von Knebel
Unfortunately, people's memories are very uneven. We tend to remember our triumphs and forget our failures.
--Jack Brennan, Straight Talk on Investing.
Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
--Whipple
Living below your means is the ultimate financial strategy.
--Jack Brennan, Straight Talk on Investing.
Living below your means is tough in a materialistic culture where advertisements constantly play with our egos and television provides endless images of the good life.
--Jack Brennan, Straight Talk on Investing.
History teaches everything, even the future.
--Lamartine
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
--Cicero
We should never despair. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth new exertions.
--George Washington
How pitiful is the ambition which desolates the world with fire and sword for the purpose of conquest and fame, compared to making our neighbors and fellowmen happy!
--George Washington
Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody; and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
I often tell my clients they should do at least 30 percent of all their reading outside their own field. This will give them perspective and knowledge that will make them more interesting.
--Roger Ailes, You Are the Message.
Advertising:
Negative information has a way of spreading a lot faster than positive information.
--Mark Joyner, The Irresistible Offer.
Persistent marketing is good marketing.
--Mark Joyner, The Irresistible Offer.
Words, be they spread through your mouth, email or print, are the most efficient, portable and speedy delivery mechanism of all.
--Mark Joyner, The Irresistible Offer.
The problem is that we're so tuned in to our own radio station so much that sometimes we're totally out of sync with even what those we love want in life.
--Mark Joyner, The Irresistible Offer.
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Introduction: The Custom-House.
Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1838.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and, lastly, the solid cash.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Horatio Bridge, March 15, 1851.
Without leaders an organization would be little more than a group of people whose random individual actions would cancel each other out.
--Francis Hasselbein and Richard Cavanaugh. Be. Know. Do.
The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
--G.D. Boardman
Habit is the most imperious of all masters.
--Goethe
All limits are self imposed.
--Icarus
There is nothing impossible to him who will try.
--Alexander the Great
There is an unfortunate disposition in a man to attend much more to the faults of his companions which offend
him, than to their perfections which please him.
--Greville, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
--Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, Essay on Poetry.
Not thinking about things is what gets people in trouble.
--Dave Ramsey, The Dave Ramsey Show, August 21, 2007.
It was really neat to see some radical life changing going on.
--Dave Ramsey Show, Caller, September 7, 2007.
The most subtle of all temptations is the "seeming" success of the
wicked. It requires moral courage to see, without flinching, material
prosperity coming to men who are dishonest; to see politicians rise
into prominence, power and wealth by trickery and corruption; to see
virtue in rags and vice in velvets; to see ignorance at a premium, and
knowledge at a discount. To the man who is really calm these puzzles of
life do not appeal. He is living his life as best he can; he is not
worrying about the problems of justice, whose solution must be left to
Omniscience to solve.
--William George Jordan, The Majesty of Calmness
Drunkenness calls off the watchman from the towers; and then all the evils that proceed from a loose heart, an untied tongue, and a dissolute spirit, we put upon its account.
--Jeremy Taylor
Capacity plus knowledge equals cash in your pocket.
--China Sinclair
You can do what is asked of you out of love of duty or out of hate. Choose your motive.
--China Sinclair
One man's word is no man's word; we should quietly hear both sides.
--Goethe
There are no judgments so harsh as those of the erring, the inexperienced, and the young.
--Miss Mulock
Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your own profession. Do not indulge yourselves to judge of things by the first glimpse, or a short and superficial view of them; for this will fill the mind with errors and prejudices, and give it a wrong turn and ill habit of thinking, and make much work for retraction.
--Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind.
Nothing tends in this respect so much to enlarge the mind as traveling, i. e., making a
visit to other towns, cities, or countries, besides those in which we were born and educated; and where our condition of life does not grant us this privilege, we must
endeavor to supply the want of it by books.
--Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind.
Talking over the things which you have read with
your companions on the first proper opportunity you
have for it, is a most useful manner of review or repetition,
in order to fix them upon the mind.
--Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find
information upon it.
--James Boswell
In reading authors, when you find
Bright passages, that strike your mind,
And which, perhaps, you may have reason
To think on, at another season,
Be not contented with the sight,
But take them down in black and white;
Such a respect is wisely shown,
As makes another's sense one's own.
--Goerge Gordon Byron
Early knowledge is very valuable capital with which to set forth in life. It gives one an advantageous start. If
the possession of knowledge has a given value at fifty, it has a much greater value at twenty-five; for there is
the use of it for twenty-five of the most important years of your life; and it is worth more than a hundred per
cent interest. Indeed, who can estimate the interest of knowledge? Its price is above rubies.
--Edward Winslow
Exercise delivers oxygen and nutrients to your tissues. In fact, regular exercise helps your entire cardiovascular system — the circulation of blood through your heart and blood vessels — work more efficiently.
--Exercise: 7 benefits of regular physical activity, Mayoclinic.com, July 26, 2007.
Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.
--Kate Douglas Wiggin, WritersAlmanac.org, Sept. 28, 2007.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
--Miguel de Cervantes
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.
--Samuel Adams
If you are waiting to get a pat on the back for how wonderful you are, you may be waiting for a very long time. The people you are waiting on are too busy trying to figure out how they are going to get a pat on the back also.
--China Sinclair
A Persian philosopher, being asked by what method he had acquired so much knowledge, answered, "By not
being prevented by shame from asking questions where I was ignorant."
--Unknown
Knowledge will not be acquired without pains and application. It is troublesome and deep, digging for pure
waters; but when once you come to the spring, they rise up and meet you.
--Felton
Hard workers are usually honest. Industry lifts them above temptation.
--Bovee
God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into the nest. He does not unearth the good that the
earth contains, but He puts it in our way, and gives us the means of getting it ourselves.
--J.G. Holland
Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.
--Emily Post
The longer I live, the more I see there's something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it's almost biological — that comforts and enlivens human beings.
--Robert Pinsky, writersalmanac.org, October 20, 2007.
He most lives,Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
--Bailey
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
--Samuel Johnson
The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity, in a girl it is boldness. The two sexes have a
tendency to approach, and each assumes the qualities of the other.
--Victor Hugo
There are but three classes of men, the retrograde, the stationary, and the progressive.
--Lavater
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.
--Swift
One principal part of good breeding is to suit our behavior to the three several degrees of men: our superiors,
our equals, and those below us.
--Swift
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
--Rene Descartes
Nobody understands human psychology like Dostoyevsky, and that's why I've banned him.
--Joseph Stalin
I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed — personally and intimately — to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago.
--Stephen Greenblatt
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
To write you have to have stories you want to tell, you have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.
--Tracy Kidder
Stupid is not illegal.
--Dave Ramsey, Radio Show, 11.08.2007.
If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
--Jose Saramago
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
--Napoleon Bonaparte
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
--Norman Cousins
How wonderful it would be if we could help our children and grandchildren to learn thanksgiving at an early age. Thanksgiving opens the doors. It changes a child's personality. A child is resentful, negative - or thankful. Thankful children want to give, they radiate happiness, they draw people.
--Sir John Templeton
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
--Lewis Thomas
The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
--Lewis Thomas
We are blinded by our own experience. We think it is the only thing that matters. We are shocked to find so little resemblance between people's lives.
--China Sinclair
The ideal way to write is as if oneself and one's readers were already dead.
--Nadine Gordimer
Audiences generally want the speaker to succeed. Part of the reason is that we can picture ourselves in the speaker's place, so we sympathize. Also, we don't want to be bored. Therefore, most audiences want to make the speaker comfortable in the hope that it will help the speaker perform better.
--Roger Ailes, You Are the Message, pg. 171.
Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
--Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 1829.
Do the Duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.
--Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, Ch. 9.
All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
--Thomas Carlyle, The Hero as Man of Letters.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
-- Unknown
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'Press on,' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
-- Calvin Coolidge
Try and fail, but don't fail to try.
-- Stephen Kaggwa
Who dares nothing need hope for nothing.
-- Friedrich Johann von Schiller
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore.
-- Unknown
Do not go where the path may lead instead go where there is no path and leave a trail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only dead fish go with the flow.
-- Unknown
To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
-- Elbert Hubbard
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Be who you are and say what you feel,
because those who mind don't matter,
and those who matter don't mind.
-- Dr. Seuss
If you have a great ambition, take as big a step as possible in the direction of fulfilling it. The step may only be a tiny one, but trust that it may be the largest one possible for now.
-- Mildred McAfee
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
--Madeleine L'Engle
When you are a young man and begin to discover the wisdom of how the world works you begin to think you know it all.
Then with another 10 years you begin to doubt all that you know. With a few more years you start to realize the wisdom
of your younger years was right after all but now you have learned what to take literally and what to take generally.
--China Sinclair
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
--Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock, Epilogue
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, O Pioneers, Part II, Ch. 4, 1913.
On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
--Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1918.
The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
--Willa Cather, My Antonia, 1918.
Music is the exaltation of the mind derived from things eternal, bursting forth in sound.
--Unsourced
Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.
--Unsourced
Sometimes the worst thing a speaker can do is get on the level with your audience in terms of attitude and thought. The best thing is to come at them with a cleaner attitude and a purer thought in order to elevate them.
--China Sinclair
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
--Emily Dickinson
The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, The New York Times, November 26, 1978.
More and more children grow up without faith in God, without belief in reward and punishment, in the immortality of the soul and even in the validity of ethics.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1978.
Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1978.
One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1978.
For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.
--Issac Bashevis Singer, Unsourced.
Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.
--Issac Bashevis Singer, Unsourced.
Mom, romance is dead. It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.
--Lisa Simpson, Animated character in TV show "The Simpsons".
In America, it seems that the government leaders are only as honest or corrupt as the people that elect them into office.
--China Sinclair
Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.
--Max Planck, Unsourced.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
--Eleanore Roosevelt
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain - but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
--Romain Rolland, Unsourced.
I know at last what distinguishes man from animals; financial worries.
--Romain Rolland, Unsourced.
Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.
--Epictetus, Book I, ch. 18.
In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.
--Epictetus, Book I, ch. 26.
What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.
--Epictetus, Book II, ch. 17
Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.
--Epictetus, Book II, ch. 18
Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours.
--Epictetus, The Enchiridion.
There are two types of people you will meet, the kind and the rude, there are no others.
--China Sinclair
It is hard to combine and unite these two qualities, the carefulness of one who is affected by circumstances, and the intrepidity of one who heeds them not. But it is not impossible: else were happiness also impossible. We should act as we do in seafaring: "What can I do?"—Choose the master, the crew, the day, the opportunity. Then comes a sudden storm. What matters it to me? my part has been fully done. The matter is in the hands of another—the Master of the ship. The ship is foundering. What then have I to do? I do the only thing that remains to me—to be drowned without fear, without a cry, without upbraiding God, but knowing that what has been born must likewise perish. For I am not Eternity, but a human being—a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day. I must come like the hour, and like the hour must pass!
--Epictetus, Golden Sayings of Epictetus, #186.
Even as the Sun doth not wait for prayers and incantations to rise, but shines forth and is welcomed by all: so thou also wait not for clapping of hands and shouts and praise to do thy duty; nay, do good of thine own accord, and thou wilt be loved like the Sun.
--Epictetus, Attributed.
Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore, give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions, and determine to pay the price for a worthy goal. The trials you encounter will introduce you to your strenghts. Remain steadfast... and one day you will build something that endures, something worthy of your potential.
--Epictetus, Attributed.
Be so good that they can't ignore you.
--Steve Martin, paraphrased.
In trying to make new friends, it is a mistake to wait for them to be kind to you, go be kind to them first. Go shake their hand and ask them, "How are you doing today?" This will connect you to more people than sitting back and waiting to be noticed.
--China Sinclair
The hero is brave in deeds as well as words.
--Aesop
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.
--George Santayana
Work is much more fun than fun.
--Noel Coward
Nothing spreads faster, for better or for worse, than attitude.
--China Sinclair
Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?
--Joseph Stalin
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pt. 6, ch. 3.
Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pt. 4, ch. 5.
Never apologize for showing feeling...When you do so, you apologize for truth.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pt. 1, ch. 13, 1832.
Amusement to an observing mind is study.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pt. 1, ch. 23.
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, pt. 1, ch. 23.
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
--Benjamin Disraeli, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy pt. 10, ch. 17.
Success is the child of audacity.
--Benjamin Disraeli, The Rise of Iskander ch. 4, 1833.
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Bk. 2, ch. 4.
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Bk. 4, ch. 1.
Man is not a rational animal. He is only truly good or great when he acts from passion.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Bk. 6, ch. 12.
Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Count Alarcos: A Tragedy Act IV, sc. i (1839).
The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Count Alarcos: A Tragedy Act IV, sc. i
The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Speech in the House of Commons, February 1, 1849.
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Speech, January 24, 1860.
What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Letter to Queen Victoria, November 4, 1868.
What one man can do himself directly is but little. If however he can stir up ten others to take up the task he has accomplished much.
--Wilbur Wright, Letter to Octave Chanute, June 1, 1900.
Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do, or what not to do.
--Jonas Salk, M.D., Interview in San Diego, California, May 16, 1991.
Events can happen to you or you can happen to events.
--China Sinclair
Match your facial expression to the seriousness of the message.
--Roger Ailes, You Are the Message.
When you're listening, how often do you interrupt others or get distracted? Try to minimize both of these blocks to better understanding.
--Roger Ailes, You Are the Message.
The mob has nothing to lose, everything to gain.
--Goethe
The world wants results, not excuses.
--Unknown
You are prosperous and wealthy when you have the money to do God's will in your life.
--Bob Gas
If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things.
--Lewis Carroll
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.
--Anton Checkhov
For as writing is the expression of life, so reading is vicarious living--living by proxy, reliving in imagination what the author has lived before he was able to write it.
--John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, Reading and Writing, 1920.
But now my soul is as a speck of life
Cast on the deserts of eternity;
--George MacDonald, Within and Without
These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my
letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me
to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as
a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual
eye.
--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 1.
The Missouri is constantly changing its course; wearing away
its banks on one side, while it forms new ones on the other. Its
channel is shifting continually. Islands are formed, and then washed
away; and while the old forests on one side are undermined and swept
off, a young growth springs up from the new soil upon the other.
--Francis Parkman, Jr., The Oregon Trail.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes;
as they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are
liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter of
chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or
discouragement.
--James Russell Lowell, Abraham Lincoln.
Arizona is a land of strong contrasts and constant surprises,
where unusual conditions prevail and the unexpected frequently
happens.
--Joseph A. Munk, Arizona Sketches.
You must not let him run wild in my absence, and will have to
exercise firm authority over all of them. This will not require
severity or even strictness, but constant attention and an unwavering
course. Mildness and forbearance will strengthen their affection for
you, while it will maintain your control over them.
--Recollections and Letters of General Lee
Of course an author cannot hold himself responsible for failures that
his reader may suffer. The statements in a book of this kind are in the
nature of advice, and it may or it may not apply in particular
conditions, and the success or failure is the result mostly of the
judgment and carefulness of the operator. I hope that no reader of a
gardening book will ever conceive the idea that reading a book and
following it literally will make him a gardener. He must always assume
his own risks, and this will be the first step in his personal progress.
--L. H. Bailey, Manual of Gardening, 1910.
Thought constitutes the greatness of man.
--Paschal, Pensees 346.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.
--Paschal, Pensees 347.
A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
--Paschal, Pensees 348.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point.
--Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Chapter 29.
That trait that distinguishes a human from all other creatures is his ability to believe, anything.
--China Sinclair
The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.
--Paschal, Pensees 352.
And what a privilege it is to be human! How much that is wonderful leaps to the eye-how the presence of beauty causes the heart to throb with a voluptuous rapture that is almost pain!
--Maxim Gorky, Through Russia
I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It's the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what's going to happen three hours from now.
--Richard Condon
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
--Arthur Schopenhauer, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 624
To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
--Karen Sunde
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.
Arnold Toynbee (1889 - 1975)
True literature must appeal to imagination and feeling as well as to intellect.
--Reuben P. Halleck, Halleck's New English Literature.
The Mission of English Literature.--It is a pertinent question to
ask, What has English literature to offer?
In the first place, to quote Ben Jonson:--
"The thirst that from the soul cloth rise
Doth ask a drink divine."
English literature is of preeminent worth in helping to supply that
thirst. It brings us face to face with great ideals, which increase
our sense of responsibility for the stewardship of life and tend to
raise the level of our individual achievement.
--Reuben P. Halleck, Halleck's New English Literature.
To prolong human life and to alleviate suffering are the ultimate objects of scientific medicine.
--Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles, Manual of Surgery.
M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
--Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
--Lord John Dalberg-Acton
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, October 26, 1939.
Our power is in our ability to decide.
--R. Buckminster Fuller
In your studies, the more focus and attention you put on your subject, the more interesting your subject becomes.
--China Sinclair
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
--William Shakespeare, Othello, Act II, Sc. 3.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
--Thomas H. Huxley
So simple, so natural, so true. This is the charm of dealing with nature herself. She brings us back to absolute truth so often as we wander.
--Louis Agassiz, A Book of Natural History, Vol. XIV.
The essence of character-building lies in action. The chief value of nature study in character-building is that, like life itself, it deals with realities. One must in life make his own observations, frame his own inductions, and apply them in action as he goes along. The habit of finding out the best thing to do next and then doing it is the basis of character. Nature-study, if it be genuine, is essentially doing. To deal with truth is necessary, if we are to know truth when we see it in action. The rocks and shells, the frogs and lilies, always tell the absolute truth. Every leaf on the tree is an original document in botany.
--David Starr Jordan, Animals, Birds and Fishes.
The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
--Oscar Wilde
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
--Cicero, Pro Plancio.
The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature,--were man as unerring in his judgments as nature.
--Longfellow, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky and the clustering stars above seems to impart a quiet to the mind.
--T. Edwards, Many Thoughts of Many Minds
The sea drives truth into a man like salt. A coward cannot long pretend to be brave at sea, nor a fool to be wise, nor a prig to be a good companion, and any venture connected with the sea is full of venture and can pretend to be nothing more.
--Hilaire Belloc, First and Last.
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
--Lily Tomlin
He that knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool: shun him.
--Arabian Maxim.
The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
--Frances Willard (1839 - 1898)
Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
--Henry George
Don't worry so much about your self-esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.
--Dr. Laura Schlessinger
The prosperity of a country depends, not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its fortifications, nor on the beauty of its public buildings; but it consists in the number of its cultivated citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment, and character; here are to be found its true interest, its chief strength, its real power.
--Martin Luther
Nosce Teipsum,
Read Thy Self.
--Thomas Hobbes
The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.
--Sydney Harris
The specialty of the future is generalism.
--Wayne Van Dyck
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
--John Updike
We go where our vision is.
--Joseph Murphy
In giving advice, seek to help, not please, your friend.
--Solon
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
--Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
--Helen Keller
Each moment in time we have it all, even when we think we don't.
--Melody Beattie
If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.
--Bruce Barton
If you don't run your own life, somebody else will.
--John Atkinson
To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.
--Henri Frdric Amiel
Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs, synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier.
--A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, April 1983.
Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.
--A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, April 1983.
Thus, we issue this call to all who care about America and its future: to parents and students; to teachers, administrators, and school board members; to colleges and industry; to union members and military leaders; to governors and State legislators; to the President; to members of Congress and other public officials; to members of learned and scientific societies; to the print and electronic media; to concerned citizens everywhere. America is at risk.
--A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, April 1983.
Superior performance can raise one's state in life and shape one's own future.
--A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, April 1983.
Losers argue about what has happened and who is at fault, and put their energy into resentment for what is. Winners choose the life they wish to create, and find a way to move toward it from any situation.
--Ralph Marston, greatday.com.
Deal with the consequences of your actions, 'cause life ain't no video game.
--Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005.
Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get them, get them right, or they will get you wrong.
--Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732.
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
--Malcolm Forbes, in Forbes Magazine.
Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.
--Carl Schurz
Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
--William Shakespeare
Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.
--William Shakespeare
Any translator knows that fidelity in expressing the meaning and feeling of an author in another tongue is a subtle and risky business.
--Calvin: Commentaries, The Library of Christian Classics, Volume XXIII.
Cultivate your curiosity. Keep it sharp and always working. Consider curiosity your life preserver, your willingness to try something new. Second, enlarge your enthusiasm to include the pursuit to excellence, following every task through to completion. Third, make the law of averages work for you. By budgeting your time more carefully than most people you can make more time available. Does the combination of curiosity, enthusiasm, and the law of averages guarantee success Indeed it does not ... Success in the final analysis always involves luck or the element of chance. Louis Pasteur grasped this well when he said that chance favors the prepared mind.
-- John W. Hanley
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.
-- William Shakespeare
Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.
--Cullen Hightower
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
--A. A. Milne
That's the secret of entertaining. You make your guests feel welcome and at home. If you do that honestly, the rest takes care of itself.
--Barbara Hall, Northern Exposure, Northern Hospitality, 1994
He lived alone, and, so to speak, outside of every social relation; and as he knew that in this world account must be taken of friction, and that friction retards, he never rubbed against anybody.
--Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days.
To touch is to experience, but to feel is to live.
--Loren Klein
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
--Alvin Toffler
Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less.
--Norman Mailer
Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
--Hyman Rickover
Defects are apt to attract attention, while perfection often passes unnoticed.
--Norval A. Hawkins, Certain Success.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
--Dr. Viktor E Frankl
The price one pays for pursuing a profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
--James Arthur Baldwin
Beyond the formative effects of reading on the individuals composing society, the fact that they have read the same books gives them experiences and ideas in common. These constitute a kind of shorthand of ideas which helps make communication quicker and more efficient. That is what we mean when we say figuratively of another person, We speak the same language.
--Charles Scribner, Jr.
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.
Peggy Noonan, Good Housekeeping.
Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau
We may all possess wisdom if we are willing to be persuaded that the experience of others is as useful as our own. Why give to old age alone the privilege of wisdom? What would be thought of one who prided himself on possessing bracelets when he had lost his two arms in war?
--Yoritomo, Japanese Philosopher.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
--Plato
Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
--Henry George
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
--Benjamin Disraeli
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
--Carl Jung
We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.
--Susan Jeffers
A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
--Thomas Hardy
Since "Heidi" has been so often translated into English it may well be asked why there is any need for a new version. The answer lies partly in the conventional character of the previous translations. Now, if there is any quality in "Heidi" that gives it a particular charm, that quality is freshness, absolute spontaneity. To be sure, the story is so attractive that it could never be wholly spoiled; but has not the reader the right to enjoy it in English at least very nearly as much as he could in German? The two languages are so different in nature that anything like a literal rendering of one into the other is sure to result in awkwardness and indirectness. Such a book must be not translated, but re-lived and re-created.
--Elisabeth Stork, Translator of Heidi.
If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.
--Albert Guinon
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
--Eric Hoffer
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
--Pliny
If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.
--Lewis Carroll
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker, attributed
It's not what you do once in a while, it's what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.
--Jenny Craig
They always talk who never think.
--Matthew Prior
Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant.
--Blaise Paschal, Pensees, #355.
The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible, that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
--John Locke, Many Thoughts from Many Minds.
Who loves not the shady trees,
The smell of flowers, the sound of brooks,
The song of birds, and the hum of bees,
Murmuring in green and fragrant nooks,
The voice of children in the spring,
Along the field-paths wandering?
--T. Millar
You will find something far greater in the woods than you will find in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you will never learn from masters.
--St. Bernard
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell
No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
--John Stuart Mill
Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life: gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should be rather an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time.
--Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest.
It’s best to take care of your own business if you don’t want someone up in your business. Your lack of attention will draw attention.
--China Sinclair
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
--Maureen Dowd
The way to procure insults is to submit to them: a man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
--William Hazlitt
There are five types of intelligence: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Extreme gifting comes when one of these is wired and functioning in a superordinary way.
--China Sinclair
Moral precepts, which to a superficial view appear arbitrary, and seem made to spoil our zest for life, have really but one object—to preserve us from the evil of having lived in vain. That is why they are constantly leading us back into the same paths; that is why they all have the same meaning: Do not waste your life, make it bear fruit; learn how to give it, in order that it may not consume itself!
--Charles Wagner, The Simple Life.
The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency.
--Terry Southern.
I have always considered the price of perfection prohibitive and allowed mistakes as a part of the learning process. I prefer a dash of daring and persistence to perfection. I have always supported learning on the part of my team members by paying vigilant attention to each of their attempts, be they successful or unsuccessful.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 58.
Total commitment is the common denominator among all successful men and women.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 90.
I have used the word 'flow' at many places without really elaborating its meaning. What is this flow? And what are these joys? I could call them moments of magic. I see an anology between these moments and the high that you experience when you play badminton or go jogging. Flow is a sensation we experience when we act with total involvement. During flow, action follows action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention on the part of the worker. There is no hurry, there are no distracting demands on one's attention. The past and the future disappear. So does the distinction between self and the activity.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 91.
A person with belief never grovels before anyone, whining and whimpering that it's all too much, that he lacks support, that he is being treated unfairly. Instead, such a person tackles problems head on and then affirms, 'As a child of God, I am greater than anything that can happen to me.'
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 135.
Are you aware of your inner signals? Do you trust them? Do you have the focus of control over your life in your own hands? Take this from me, the more decisions you can make avoiding external pressures, which will constantly try to manipulate and immobilize you, the better your life will be, the better your society will become. The entire nation will benefit from having strong, inner-directed people as their leaders.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 175.
Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to be willing to take the social or external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Wings of Fire, 1999, p. 176.
Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Attributed.
Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.
--APJ Abdul Kalam, Attributed.
It's who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself—Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.
--Jesus Christ, John 4:23-24, The Message.
God writes his love on stars and flowers, on every piece of creation.
--China Sinclair
It is printed in starry letters on the sky. It is graven on the rocks, and breathed by
the flowers.
--Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Psalms.
No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The essence of being human is being able to direct your own life.
--Steven R. Covey
Employment, which Galen calls "nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
--Burton
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
--Christopher Morley
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
--Anonymous
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
--Mark Twain
Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.
--A. R. Ammons
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no other agent.
--William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.
The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical
duty.
--Schiller
Public opinion, though often formed upon a wrong basis, yet generally has a strong underlying sense of
justice.
--Abraham Lincoln
Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good actions; try to use ordinary situations.
--Richter
Give me a chance, says Stupid, and I will show you. Ten to one he has had his chance already, and neglected
it.
--Haliburton
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
--Burke
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
--Eric Hoffer
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
--Eleanor Roosevelt
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
--Benjamin Franklin
Never spend your money before you have it.
--Thomas Jefferson
There are two types of fulfillment in life, one is immediate and short-lived, the other is delayed and life-long. Aim for the second whenever possible.
--China Sinclair
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
--Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Chapter 43.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
--Eugene Ionesco
True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go.
--P.T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting.
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
--Coco Chanel
Only the shallow know themselves.
--Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, 1882.
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
--Ray Bradbury
You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything --even poverty--you can survive it.
--Bill Cosby
I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart but the saying is true 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound'.
--William Shakespeare
It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones, and the
saying is true if taken to mean no more than that an army is better
directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones at
variance and cross-purposes with each other.
--Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Address, December 3, 1861.
And the same is true in all joint operations wherein those engaged can have
none but a common end in view and can differ only as to the choice of
means. In a storm at sea no one on board can wish the ship to sink, and yet
not unfrequently all go down together because too many will direct and no
single mind can be allowed to control.
--Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Address, December 3, 1861.
Faith is God’s common sense.
--China Sinclair
The true felicity of life is to be free from anxieties and perturbations to understand and do our duties to God and man, and to enjoy the present without any serious dependence on the future.
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.
--Charles Lamb, The Two Races of Men.
You often get a better hold upon a problem by going away from it for a time and dismissing it from your mind altogether.
--Frank H. Crane
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
--Henry David Thoreau
Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
--Oswald Spengler
Don’t pretend that you don’t have emotions. Learn to pay attention to them. They will tell you volumes of who you are. Don’t let them run wild in the jungle but notice them when they spontaneously spring from inside and then ask, "Why do I feel this way?"
--China Sinclair
Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem so.
--Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
--Albert Einstein
The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.
Vladimir Lenin, Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21, pages 158-164.
To-morrow will not do what is not done to-day.
Let not a day be lost in dallying,
But seize the possibility
Right by the forelock, courage rallying.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest. It is your cool, dissembling hypocrite of whom you should beware.
--Lavater
That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are times when there is no illumination and no thrill, but just the daily round, the common task. Routine is God's way of saving us between our times of inspiration. Do not expect God always to give you His thrilling minutes, but learn to live in the domain of drudgery by the power of God.
--Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest.
What is it men cannot be made to believe?
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Richard Henry Lee, April 22, 1786.
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
--Dr. Seuss
Walking is man's best medicine.
--Hippocrates
It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy.
--Hesiod
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.
--Sir Richard Steele
An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
--Washington Irving
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
--Pablo Picasso
A vivid imagination is a sign of intelligence.
--Peggy Noonan, Simply Speaking.
The perceptive find wisdom in their own front yard; fools look for it everywhere but right here.
--Proverbs 17:24, The Message.
Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
--Jane Wagner
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
--Andy Rooney
Blessed are they who know their own limitations, for they shall have joy in the accomplishment of others.
--Arthur Hartmann, Violin Mastery, Chapter 6.
Truth is always simple. If it seems difficult it is due to our clumsy
way of stating it.
--D. A. Clippinger, The Head Voice and Other Problems.
Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.
--Gore Vidal
And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
--Earl Mac Rauch
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
--Victor Hugo
There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.
--George Washington
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, Uses of Great Men.
A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds to religion.
--Francis Bacon
As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it; 'tis the short-hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room.
--Jeremy Collier
Spite of Lavater, faces are oftentimes great lies. They are the paper money of society, for which, on demand, there frequently proves to be no gold in the human coffer.
--F.G. Trafford
People's opinions of themselves are legible in their countenances.
--Jeremy Collier
Truth, on these subjects, is militant, and can only establish itself by means of conflict. The most opposite opinions can make a plausible show of evidence while each has the statement of its own case; and it is only possible to ascertain which of them is in the right, after hearing and comparing what each can say against the other, and what the other can urge in its defence.
--John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic.
The sole object of Logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts; the communication of those thoughts to others falls under the consideration of Rhetoric . . .
--John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic.
But we may fancy that we see or feel what we in reality infer. Newton saw the truth of many propositions of geometry without reading the demonstrations, but not, we may be sure, without their flashing through his mind. A truth, or supposed truth, which is really the result of a very rapid inference, may seem to be apprehended intuitively. It has long been agreed by thinkers of the most opposite schools, that this mistake is actually made in so familiar an instance as that of the eyesight. There is nothing of which we appear to ourselves to be more directly conscious, than the distance of an object from us. Yet it has long been ascertained, that what is perceived by the eye, is at most nothing more than a variously coloured surface; that when we fancy we see distance, all we really see is certain variations of apparent size, and degrees of faintness of colour; and that our estimate of the object's distance from us is the result of a comparison (made with so much rapidity that we are unconscious of making it) between the size and colour of the object as they appear at the time, and the size and colour of the same or of similar objects as they appeared when close at hand, or when their degree of remoteness was known by other evidence. The perception of distance by the eye, which seems so like intuition, is thus, in reality, an inference grounded on experience; an inference, too, which we learn to make; and which we make with more and more correctness as our experience increases; though in familiar cases it takes place, so rapidly as to appear exactly on a par with those perceptions of sight which are really intuitive, our perceptions of colour.
--John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic.
The province of logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence. In so far as belief professes to be founded on proof, the office of logic is to supply a test for ascertaining whether or not the belief is well grounded. With the claims which any proposition has to belief on the evidence of consciousness, that is, without evidence in the proper sense of the word, logic has nothing to do.
--John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic.
I value books for their suggestiveness even more than for the information they may contain, works that may be taken in hand and laid aside, read at moments, containing sentences that quicken my thoughts and prompt to following these into their relations with life and things.
--Amos Bronson Alcott, Table-talk.
Life and literature need the inspiration which idealism quickens and promotes, the history of thought showing that a people given over to sensationalism and the lower forms of materialism have run to ruin.
--Amos Bronson Alcott, Table-talk.
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America, 1958.
Don't write so that you can be understood, write so that you can't be misunderstood.
--William Howard Taft
God does not hear us because we are in earnest, but only on the ground of Redemption. God is never impressed by our earnestness. Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God.
--Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, September 16th reading.
Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
--Unknown
People are little creatures with big capacities, finite beings with infinite desires, deserving nothing but demanding all. God made people with this huge capacity and desire in order that He might come in and completely satisfy that desire.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
Get Christ and go to heaven.
--John Bunyan
What have we our time and strength for, but to lay them out for God? What is a candle made for, but to burn? Burned and wasted we must be; and is it not fitter it should be in lighting men to heaven, and in working for God, than in living to the flesh?
--Richard Baxter
If God can be fully proved by the human mind, then He is no greater than the mind that proves Him.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.
--John Gray, Children Are From Heaven.
Underpromise; overdeliver.
--Tom Peters, The Chicago Tribune.
The colored sunsets and starry heavens, the beautiful mountains and the shining seas, the fragrant woods and painted flowers, are not half so beautiful as a soul that is serving Jesus out of love, in the wear and tear of common, unpoetic life.
--Faber
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have.
--Soren Kierkegaard
Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
--Charles Scribner, Jr.
Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on
--Peter McWilliams
Then, rising with aurora's light,
The muse invoked, sit down to write;
Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your head and bite your nails.
--Johnathan Swift
People should be guarded against temptation to unlawful pleasures by furnishing them the means of innocent ones. In every community there must be pleasures, relaxations, and means of agreeable excitement; and if innocent are not furnished, resort will be had to criminal. Man was made to enjoy as well as labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature.
--Channing
The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
--Cervantes
We should conduct ourselves not as if we ought to live for the body, but as if we could not live without it.
--Seneca
Christianity is not a system of morals, it is the worship of a Person.
--Lecky
If you don't make your dreams a reality, reality will take away your dreams.
--Eric Pio
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
--Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Bk. I, Part II, ch. 11, 1945.
Mental humility, it may be said, is the greatest quality lacking in the sporadic Protestant sects and cults ever springing up in our midst. Their self-confident assumption that they possess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth gives their witness a pioneering zeal at the start but makes them ridiculous in the end.
--Ralph W. Sockman, The Open Mind, Protestantism: A Symposium, ed. W.K. Anderson, 1944.
I have found that praise goes a lot further than criticism. Everybody needs to be appreciated.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
--Malayan Proverb
If I exist, God exists.
--Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, September 24, 1931.
When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.
--Henry J. Kaiser
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
--Robert Frost, New York Times, Nov. 7, 1955.
Defects are perceived only by one who has no love.
--Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.
Generosity wins favor for every one, especially when it is accompanied by modesty.
--Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.
What a man does not understand, he does not possess.
--Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.
Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.
--Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.
So obstinately contradictory is man that you cannot compel him to his advantage, yet he yields before everything that compels him to his hurt.
--Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe.
Avoid all haste; calmness is an essential ingredient of politeness.
--Alphonse Karr, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.
--Fielding, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
Avoid popularity, it has many snares, and no real benefit.
--William Penn, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
No one can possibly know what is about to happen. It is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
--James Arthur Baldwin
A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
--Francis Bacon
Each time a human cell divides, it must replicate its DNA, a manuscript some 3 million characters long.
--Time Magazine
When we look back at our experience, we can see so clearly its ephemeral, dreamlike nature. Yet when we look ahead, when we look to the future, somehow (and this is the great enchantment) we get dazzled by all the possibilities that are there waiting for us as if the next event in our lives, the next sitaution, the next project, the next reationship, the next meal, even on meditation the next breath ... we live our lives in anticipation of the next hit of experience as if the one that's coming will finally do it for us. What's so strange is that nothing up 'til now has brought that sense of real completion or fulfillment. So why are we so seduced into thinking that the next one will? This is a very strange phenomena.
--Joseph Goldstein, Wisdom and Compassion.
In high-stress disaster situations, our brains rapidly sort through our relevant knowledge in search of useful information and an appropriate response. If we have no relevant information in our mental files, it greatly increases the odds that our brain will shut down or that it will come up with a solution that isn’t helpful, such as waiting for an elevator rather than taking the stairs to get out of a burning building.
--Amanda Ripley, How to Survive a Disaster, bottomlinesecrets.com.
I have never met anyone who spent time in daily prayer, and in the study of the Word of God, and was strong in faith, who was ever discouraged for very long.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.
--Samuel Smiles
But what all specialists--even those of us who call ourselves generalists--what we must all learn to do when writing about our experience is translate it into terms familiar to our readers.
--Carol Gelderman, Better Business Writing.
The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.
--Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, 2005.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower
A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year.
--Polish Proverb
Those who wish to sing always find a song.
--Swedish Proverb
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
--Lionel Trilling
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
--Margaret Thatcher
An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor. For an actor to represent a Greek hero it is imperative he should have thoroughly studied those antique statues which have lasted to our day, and mastered the particular grace they exhibited in their postures, whether sitting, standing, or walking. Nor should he make attitude his only study. He should highly develop his mind by an assiduous study of the best writers, ancient and modern, which will enable him not only to understand his parts, but to communicate a nobler coloring to his manners and mien.
--Goethe
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered
--Voltaire
Thanksgiving is recognition of a debt that cannot be paid.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
--C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
--Mario Cuomo
The true test of a brilliant theory [is] what first is thought to be wrong is later shown to be obvious.
--Assar Lindbeck
Immortal gods! how much does one man excel another! What a difference there is between a wise person and a fool!
--Terence
Simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect.
--John, Viscount Morley
To appreciate heaven well
’Tis good for a man to have some fifteen minutes of hell.
--Will Carleton
Our unbelief is the greatest hindrance in our way; in fact, there is no other real difficulty as to our spiritual progress and prosperity. The Lord can do everything; but when He makes a rule that according to our faith so shall it be unto us, our unbelief ties the hands of His omnipotence.
--Charles Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook, December 9 entry.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Art, 1841.
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
--Robert Service
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that 'a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.' So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason, and which, once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing him of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause is really a good one.
--Abraham Lincoln
There is no capital more useful than intellect and wisdom, and there is no indigence more injurious than ignorance and unawareness.
--Ali bin Abu-Talib, Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p.198
There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance.
--Unknown
Associating with the wise and the knowledgeable people adds to the prestige of a person.
--Ali bin Abu-Talib, Majlisi, Biharul Anwar, vol.78, p.6
If reality isn't working for you, change it.
--Ralph Marston, Greatday.com, December 13, 2008 entry.
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.
--Gustave Flaubert
You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
--Gustave Flaubert
I appreciate people who are civil, whether they mean it or not. I think: Be civil. Do not cherish your opinion over my feelings. There's a vanity to candor that isn't really worth it. Be kind.
--Richard Greenberg, NY Times Magazine, March 26, 2006.
Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper.
--Dr. Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732.
Before you do anything, think. If you do something to try and impress someone, to be loved, accepted or even to get someone's attention, stop and think. So many people are busy trying to create an image, they die in the process.
--Salma Hayek
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
--Carl Gustav Jung
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
--Shunryu Suzuki
If there's anything mean in a feller, a little authority will bring it out.
--Kin Hubbard, Abe Martin's Back Country Sayings, 1917.
A blind man should not judge of colours.
--Scotch Proverb
Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason.
--Blaise Paschal, Pensees, #369.
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them. A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down. I write instead that it has escaped me.
--Blaise Paschal, Pensees, #370.
The things of earth are as nothing in preciousness compared with the things in heaven.
--Charles Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook, December 23 entry.
The advocate can make no greater mistake than to ignore or attempt to conceal the weak points in his case. The most effective strategy is at an early stage of the argument to invite attention to your weakest point before the court has discovered it, then to meet it with the best answers at your disposal, to deal with all the remaining points with equal candor, and to end with as powerful a presentation of your strongest point as you are capable of making.
--Justice Robert H. Jackson, America's Advocate: Robert H. Jackson, Ch. 24, 1958.
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.
--Sir Richard Steele, Many Thoughts of Many Minds.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
--George Orwell
Once writing over what we design to remember, and giving due attention to what we write, will fix it more in the mind than reading it five times.
--Isaac Watts, Improvement of the Mind, Chapter 11.
I am not afraid of being charged, as I frequently am, of trying to frighten you, for I am definitely trying to do so. If the wondrous love of God in Christ Jesus and the hope of glory is not sufficient to attract you, then, such is the value I attach to the worth of your soul, I will do my utmost to alarm you with a sight of the terrors of hell.
--Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
--C. Northcote Parkinson
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
--Mother Teresa
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
--Book of Common Prayer
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
--J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories, 1939.
No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.
--J. R. R. Tolkien, English and Welsh, 1955.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
Be a fountain, not a drain.
--Rex Hudler, Sports Illustrated.
Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.
--Corita Kent
Drink nothing without seeing it; sign nothing without reading it.
--Spanish Proverb
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
--Henri Matisse
Common sense and education are highly compatible in fact, neither is worth much without the other.
--Donald G. Smith
It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of activity or methods. It must always relate directly to how life is better for everyone. . . . The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment.
--W. Edwards Deming
The church is a tender plant. It must be watched. People hear a couple of sermons, scan a few pages of Holy Writ, and think they know it all. They are bold because they have never gone through any trials of faith. Void of the Holy Spirit, they teach what they please as long as it sounds good to the common people who are ever ready to join something new.
--Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians.
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
--Alfred Korzybski
I wanted to write this novel in the first person, and in the present tense. The novel gets to say we're present tense here, and yet we can read the present over and over again. Which is quite a nice thing to do, we'd all be better off if we could not stop time but slow it down a little bit, and live the pleasant things more pleasantly and live the incautious things more cautiously.
--Richard Ford, Writersalmanac.org, Feb. 16, 2009.
The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
--Mahatma Gandhi
A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
--Will Rogers
Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.
--Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life, 1977.
Do good, no matter to whom.
--Italian Proverb
Faces are as legible as books, only they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us.
--Lavater
Let a good man do good deeds with the same zeal that the evil man does bad ones.
--The Belzer Rabbi
Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1962.
Look for the ridiculous in everything, and you will find it.
--Jules Renard
We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it.
--Jules Renard
Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
--Jules Renard
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
--Jules Renard
If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more.
--Jules Renard
God does not believe in our God.
--Jules Renard
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
--Jules Renard
On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.
--Jules Renard
There are moments when everything goes well, but don't be frightened.
--Jules Renard
Truth makes many appeals, not the least of which is its power to shock.
--Jules Renard
I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.
--Jules Renard
Don't tell a woman she's pretty; tell her there's no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you.
--Jules Renard
Here is the Truth in a little creed,
Enough for all the roads we go:
In Love is all the law we need,
In Christ is all the God we know.
--Edwin Markham
All things good to know are difficult to learn.
--Greek Proverb
Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
--Edith Grossman, Speech on November 5, 2003, 2003 PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez
Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men.
--Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey Part 6, ch. 7, 1826.
The hardest part about working in a peanut butter factory is keeping everything from sticking to the roof.
--John Maclain
Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
--Smedley Butler, War is a racket, 1935.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.
--Eric Idle
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
--Cato the Elder
Vanity asks the question -- is it popular? Conscience asks the question -- is it right?
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Sermon, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968.
It is impossible to believe anything into existence. The Gospel did not come into being because men believed it. The tomb was not emptied of Christ’s body that first Easter because some faithful persons believed it. The fact preceded the faith.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
Shallow men believe in luck. Wise and strong men believe in cause and effect.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
We never know how much one loves till we know how much he is willing to endure and suffer for us; and it is the suffering element that measures love.
--H. W. Beecher
Luck is the residue of design.
--Branch Rickey
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
--George S. Patton
Some consider themselves wise because they dare to question everything. In truth, this is no more than cynicism. Real wisdom comes from acknowledging what is, by loving the beauty of what is self-evident. Too much energy is spent by questioning and not enough accepting the obvious.
--China Sinclair
But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.
--Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919.
I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
--Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919.
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
--Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy.
Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with the wind.
--Hamilton Mabie
'Tis not every question that deserves an answer.
--Thomas Fuller
Christ does come to us every day in the form of Bibles that we do not read, in the form of churches that we do not attend, in the form of human need that we pass by.
--Billy Graham, Day by Day With Billy Graham, 1976.
One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
To harken to evil conversation is the road to wickedness.
--Anonymous
Godliness consists not in a heart which intends to do the will of God, but in a heart which does it.
--Jonathan Edwards
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
--Annie Dillard, The Writing Life.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
--John Steinbeck
He opened the door and a blast of February wind rattled the
window-frames.
--Mary Roberts Rinehart, Where There's A Will
Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
--Henry David Thoreau
The price of group membership is conformity to prevailing norms.
--James MacGregor Burns
For it is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent.
--Marcus Fabius Quintilian
Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: It's good to be silly at the right moment.
--Horace
I try to get at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. Sleep is how your body repairs itself from the day’s activity. Our bodies are a chemistry lab, not a bank account. When you shortchange your sleep patterns, you’re not only tired the next day -- you’ve also lost out on critical healing.
--Valerie Ramsey, Aging Gracefully, BottomLineSecrets.com.
When griping grief the heart doth wound,
And doleful dumps the mind oppress,
Then music with her silver sound,
With speedy help doth lend redress.
--William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act iv, Scene 5.
Man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other.
--Charles Lamb
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
--Robert Graves
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
--Ovid
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
--John Quincy Adams
To the good listener half a word is enough.
--Spanish proverb
Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
--Frank Zappa
I told you these things so that you can have peace in me. In this world you will have trouble, but be brave! I have defeated the world.
--The Bible, John 16:33, Scripture taken from the New Century Version. Copyright © 2005 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
A page of good prose remains invincible.
--John Cheever
Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.
--Voltaire
Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
--Jules Renard
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
--Jiddu Krishnamurti
The question should be, is it worth trying to do, not can it be done.
--Allard Lowenstein, O Magazine, September 2002.
The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.
--Tryon Edwards
If your project doesn't work, look for the part that you didn't think was important.
--Arther Bloch
Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter.
--Paxton Hood, A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1908.
You are in no position to challenge a rule or bend a rule until you have kept that rule, tested it and learned why it was placed there. A rule is a safeguard to keep you from hurting yourself on the path you are on. You have not walked the full length of the path yet, but others have.
--China Sinclair
The highest and most intense worship takes place when we can do nothing but be amazed, when we are rendered helpless and speechless with wonder and gratitude, when we just sit back and watch God work.
--R.T. Kendall
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
--Katherine Anne Porter
You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
--Katherine Anne Porter, Writers at Work, Interview, 1963.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
--Bertrand Russell
The issue is not the magnitude of our problem or circumstance, the issue is do we trust God in that problem or circumstance.
--Unknown
Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.
--Mortimer Adler
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
--Jodie Foster
One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
--William Feather
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
--Josh Billings, Josh Billings: His Sayings, 1865
Affection can withstand very severe storms of vigor, but not a long polar frost of indifference.
--Sir Walter Scott
The reality is that what an investor "knows" about the future is small compared to what he can't know.
--Just One Thing, pg.31.
The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. If things are dark to me, then I may be sure there is something I will not do. Intellectual darkness comes through ignorance; spiritual darkness comes because of something I do not intend to obey.
--Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, July 27th reading.
In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.
--Thomas Jefferson
I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
--Rita Mae Brown
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
--Georges Braque
Truth will rise above falsehood as oil above water.
--Miguel de Cervantes
We live in the present, we dream of the future and we learn eternal truths from the past.
--Mme. Chaing Kai-Shek
Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.
--Malcolm Forbes
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