Lots of short Inspirational Quotes

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
-Â Â Â Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
-Â Â Â Abraham Lincoln

None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.
-Â Â Â Henry Ford
The more I see, the more I know, the more I know, the less I understand

- Paul Weller
Don’t be so humble - you are not that great.
- Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat
His ignorance is encyclopaedic
- Abba Eban (1915-)
If a man does his best, what else is there?
- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
- A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
- Saint Augustine (354-430)
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
- Galileo Galilei
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
- Emile Zola (1840-1902)
This book fills a much-needed gap.
- Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review
The full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
- definition ofÂ happinessÂ by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
- e e cummings (1894-1962)
Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Assassins!
- Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra
I’ll moider da bum.
- Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
- Rene Descartes (1596-1650),Â Discours de la Methode
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.
- Yoda (’The Empire Strikes Back’)
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
Don’t stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
- George Burns (1896-1996)
I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
- Edsgar Dijkstra
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
- Bjarne Stroustrup
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
- Paul Erdos
The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.
- Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
- Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog calfed ‘Ego’.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
I think ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.
- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) when asked what is his favorite song
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.
- Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)
The difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was ‘involved’ - the pig was ‘committed’.
- unknown
If you are going through hell, keep going.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
- H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
- Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)
If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.
- J. Paul Getty (1892-1976)
Facts are the enemy of truth.
- Don Quixote -Â Man of La Mancha
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
- George Washington Carver (1864-1943)
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
- Anais Nin (1903-1977)
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)
I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
- Frederick (II) the Great
Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
- George Eliot (1819-1880)
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
- Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
- Steven Wright
I’ve had a wonderful time, but this wasn’t it.
- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Walt Disney (1901-1966)
We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.
- Vince Lombardi
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
- James Branch Cabell
A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.
- John D. Rockefeller (1874-1960)
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
- G. K. Chesterfield
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
- Umberto Eco
Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down.
- Jimmy Durante
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Basically, I no longer work for anything but the sensation I have while working.
- Albert Giacometti (sculptor)
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.
- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
- Isaac Asimov
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- Carl Sagan
It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one’s doubts.
- G. B. Burgin
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
- Auric Goldfinger, inÂ GoldfingerÂ by Ian L. Fleming (1908-1964)
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance
- - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
- Jimi Hendrix
A clever man commits no minor blunders.
- Goethe (1749-1832)
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.
- Richard Bach
A witty saying proves nothing.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durant
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
- Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.)
It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.
- Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
- Henry Ford (1863-1947)
I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
- Warren Zevon
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
- Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
- Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
While we are postponing, life speeds by.
- Seneca (3BC - 65AD)
Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches.
- the Duchess of Windsor, when asked what is the secret of a long and happy life
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Luck is the residue of design.
- Branch Rickey - former owner of the Brooklyn Dodger Baseball Team
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Wit is educated insolence.
- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
- Socrates (470-399 B.C.)
Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
- Gore Vidal
Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.
- Samuel Palmer (1805-80)
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?
- Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
- Paul Dirac (1902-1984)
I would have made a good Pope.
- Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
- John von Neumann (1903-1957)
The mistakes are all waiting to be made.
- chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game’s opening position
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.
- Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
- H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
- C. A. R. Hoare
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
What do you take me for, an idiot?
General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy
I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.
- Bill Hirst
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959 )
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
Logic is in the eye of the logician.
- Gloria Steinem
No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
- William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
- Martin Fraquhar Tupper
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I’ll waste no time reading it.
- Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.
- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
- Goethe (1749-1832)

In the end, everything is a gag.
- Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.
- Lucille S. Harper

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
- Yogi Berra

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.
- Walt Disney (1901-1966)

He who hesitates is a damned fool.
- Mae West (1892-1980)

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
- Gail Godwin

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
- Henry Kissinger (1923-)

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
- Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.
- Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.
- Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
I am not young enough to know everything.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
- General George Patton (1885-1945)
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I don’t even butter my bread; I consider that cooking.
- Katherine Cebrian
I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.
- Steven Wright
Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.
- Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
- Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
I have read your book and much like it.
- Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
The covers of this book are too far apart.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
- Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
- Voltaire (1694-1778)
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.
- Mae West (1892-1980)
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
- Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
No Sane man will dance.
- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
Vote early and vote often.
- Al Capone (1899-1947)
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Hell is other people.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
I am become death, shatterer of worlds.
- Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion)
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
- Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
- Thomas Jones
You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
- Al Capone (1899-1947)
The gods too are fond of a joke.
- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
- Gloria Leonard
It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
- Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell
Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.
- Robert Orben
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.
- Plato (427-347 B.C.)
Plato was a bore.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.
- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Hemingway was a jerk.
- Harold Robbins
How can I lose to such an idiot?
- A shout from chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)
Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.
- Woody Allen (1935-)
I don’t feel good.
- The last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.
- Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)
Men have become the tools of their tools.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant.
- Richard J. Ferris, president of United Airlines
I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.
- Gore Vidal
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
- Woody Allen (1935-)
Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.
- Abba Eban (1915-)
To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me.
- Charles William Stubbs
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
- George Santayana (1863-1952)
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
- Fred Allen (1894-1956)
Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
In America, anybody can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.
- Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.
- Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Why don’t you write books people can read?
- Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
- Tom Stoppard
Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.
- Karl Wallenda
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
- Sun Tzu
A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
- Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay
Never mistake motion for action.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Hell is paved with good samaritans.
- William M. Holden
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
- Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1967)
Well done is better than well said.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The average person thinks he isn’t.
- Father Larry Lorenzoni
Heav’n hath no rage like love to hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.
- William Congreve (1670-1729)
A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
- Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
- Perelman
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
There is a country in Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal.
- Sigfried Hulzer
Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.
- Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), while working, when informed that his wife is dying
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943
I think it would be a good idea.
- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!
- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?
- Will Rogers (1879-1935)
The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.
- Von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
- Irving Kristol
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
- Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.
- A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?
- H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927
We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.
- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
- Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.
- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
- last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923)
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527),Â The Prince
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live
We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
- Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks
Half this game is ninety percent mental.
- Yogi Berra
There is only one nature - the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.
- Bill Wulf
There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
- Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I criticize by creation - not by finding fault.
- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Love is friendship set on fire.
- Jeremy Taylor
God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.
- Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair
My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate.
- Unibomber Theodore Kaczynski, when asked in court what his current profession was
Woman was God’s second mistake.
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
This isn’t right, this isn’t even wrong.
- Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), upon reading a young physicist’s paper
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
Pray, n:. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.
Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
He would make a lovely corpse.
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.
- Irvin S. Cobb
I worship the quicksand he walks in.
- Art Buchwald
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery (1871-1945)
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction.
- General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
- Seymour Cray (1925-1996), father of supercomputing
#3 pencils and quadrille pads.
- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he used to design the Cray I supercomputer; he also recommended using the back side of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant.
I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray.
- Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.
Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.
- Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.
- Francois-Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The truth is more important than the facts.
- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
- Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
- Robert Frost

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.
- Franklin P. Jones

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like ?
- Jean Cocturan

It’s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world everyday always just exactly fits the newspaper.
- Jerry Seinfeld

If it were not for Thomas Edison, we would all be watching television in the dark.
- Michael Landon

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
- Wendell Johnson

It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.
- Darrin Weinberg

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you
will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
- Fran Lebowitz

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.
- Albert Einstein

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.Â — T.S. Eliot

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.Â — Vaclav Havel

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now — when?Â — Hillel

Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.Â — Tennyson

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.Â — Zen proverb

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.Â — Meister Eckhart

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.Â — Albert Einstein

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.Â — Victor Frankl

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.Â — Unknown

The shell must break before the bird can fly.Â — Tennyson

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.Â — Carl Jung

The years teach much that the days never know.Â — Emerson

If you bring forth what is within you, it will heal you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.Â (from the Gospel of St. Thomas)

Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.Â — William Shakespeare

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.Â — Albert Einstein

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.Â — Albert Schweitzer

The difference between a smart person and a wise person is that a smart person knows what to say and a wise person knows whether or not to say it.Â — Quote found on the wall of a recreation center office in Berkeley, California.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.Â — Dave Gardner

We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.Â — Talmud

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.Â Â — Helen Keller

This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.Â — George Bernard Shaw

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
– W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
–Oswald Spengler
In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.Â -Baba Dioum

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.Â -Michael Cibenko

No day in which you learn something is a complete loss.Â David Eddings

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.Â Lao-tzu

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.Â Anais Nin

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.Â Charles R Swindoll

It’s amazing what God can do with a broken heart when given all the pieces.Â -Anonymous

The only way to see a rainbow is to look through the rain.Â -unknown

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.Â -Plato

Worry looks around; sorrow looks back; faith looks up.

A smile is a light in the window of your face to show your heart is at home.Â -unknown

The bridges you cross before you come to them are over rivers that aren’t there.Â -Gene Brown

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.Â -Confucious
Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have.Â -Doris Mortman

One today is worth two tomorrows.Â -Ben Franklin

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.Â -Annie Dillard

Many people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.

Kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.Â -Joseph Joubert

When you say a situation or person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.Â -Rev. Charles L Allen

The worst prison would be a closed heart.Â -Pope John Paul II

When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always be worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad that they have to get better.Â -Malcolm S Forbes

More important than how we live is how we spend each day.

Only He who made hearts can unite them.

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Others stay awhile, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.

Love me or hate me but spare me your indifference.Â -Libbie Fudim

What you see depends on what you’re looking for.

Remembering is the dream that comes in waves.

Success is the child of audacity. -BenjaminDisraeli

To climb steep hills requires slow pace at first. -WilliamShakespeare

The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success hasn’t been asleep. -Wilson Mizner

There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it. -ChristopherMorley

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. -Albert Einstein
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. -Henry David Thoreau
Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early. -Anthony Troloppe
The secret of success is constancy of purpose. â€“Benjamin Disraeli

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence,and then Success is sure. -Mark Twain

Success has always been a great liar. -FriedrichNietzsche

The road to success is filled with women pushing their husbands along. -Thomas R. Dewar
The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you. -M. W. Little

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom. -Michel de Montaigne

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.-William Blake

We grow small trying to be great. -E. Stanley Jones

Hitch your wagon to a star. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him. -Booker T. Washington

There ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions. -David Hume

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. -William Shakespeare

Ambition is not a vice of little people. â€“Michel de Montaigne

Ambition is the last refuge of failure. â€“Oscar Wilde

The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves. -Herbert N.Casson

Some folks can look so busy doing nothin’ that they seem indispensable. -Kin Hubbard

Too low they build who build below the skies. â€“Edward Young

The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune. -William Penn

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. â€“William Shakespeare

A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward. -GeorgeJean Nathan

It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it. -Seneca

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping. -JonathanSwift

Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens. -William Lilly
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. -NiccolÃ² Machiavelli
He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below. -Lord Byron
If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest.-Publilius Syrus
Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment. -Thomas Otway
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful land good, and we must hunger after them. -George Eliot
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory. -Cicero
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds. -Thomas Dunn English
There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves. -Arthur P. Stanley
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. -Joseph Conrad
When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honourable to reach the second or even the third rank. -Cicero
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: westorm heaven itself in our folly. -Horace
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an ideawhich is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one producesaspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires. -HenryWard Beecher
Most people would succeed in small things if they werenot troubled with great ambitions. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Success is not forever, and failure is not fatal. -DonShula
That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it and what we take awayfrom it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, iswinning. -Richard Bach.
Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try. -StarWars
Experience is the name that everyone gives to his mistakes. -Oscar Wilde.
I’ll never be considered one of the all-time greats;maybe not even one of the all-time goods. But I’m one of the all-time survivors. -JimKaat.
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door. â€“Milton Berle.
Only the mediocre are always at their best. -Giraudoux.

There’s always room at the top. -Webster.

I’m not a good shot, but I shoot often. â€“TheodoreRoosevelt

Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal. -Cossman.

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. -Ruskin.

There are three ways a man can be ruined: women,gambling, and farming. My father chose the most boring. -Pope John XXIII

Success is more attitude then aptitude. -Unknown.

The only way to succeed is to make people hate you. That way, they remember you. -von Sternberg.

Man errs as long as he strives. -Goethe.

He who never fell never climbed. -Unknown.

It is not enough to succed. Others must fail. - Gore Vidal

… high salaries equals happiness equals project success. -Richard F. Moore

Give me a firm place to stand, and I will move the earth. -Archimedes

At some time in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out. -Richard H. Brien

Each person has the right to take part in the management of public affairs in his country, provided he has prior experience, a will to succeed, a college degree, influential parents, good looks, a resume, two 3X4 snapshots, and a good tax record. -Carlos Eduardo Novaes

First must give place to last, because last must have his time to come; but last gives place to nothing, for there is not another to succeed. -Bunyan

How far high failure overleaps the bounds of low success. -Lewis Morris

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure which is: Try to please everybody. -Herbert Bayard Swope

I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. -Henry David Thoreau

If a man is happy in his work exerting himself to the full extent of his capabilities, and enjoying it I’d say he’s a success. -William Romain

If at first you don’t succeed, blame it on the teacher. -Stacey Bass

If at first you don’t succeed, try something else. -Laurance J. Peter

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about things. -W. C. Fields

If at first you don’t succeed, you must be doing something wrong. -Charles Merrill Smith

In Fame’s temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels or successful butchers of the human race. -Zimmermam

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.
-Samuel Johnson

Many people have the ambition to succeed in their work; they may even have special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job, there is no need to master themselves.
-John Stevenson

Men are so constituted that everybody undertakes what he sees another successful in, whether he has aptitude for it or not. -Goethe

Men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. Whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level. -Alexis de Tocqueville

Nature gave man two ends one to sit on and one to think with. Ever since then man’s success or failure has been dependent on the one he used most. -George R. Kirkpatrick

Nothing succeeds like success. -Alexandre Dumas

Seers and soothsayers read crystal balls to find the future. Less lucky men read junk with more success.-Richard N. Farmer

Stability is more essential to success than brilliance. -Richard Lloyd Jones

Success can be insured only by devising a defense against the contingency plan.
-Charles P. Boyle

Success is not a harbor but a voyage with its own perils to the spirit. The game of life is to come up a winner, to be a success, or to achieve what we set out to do. Yet there is always the danger of failing as a human being. The lesson that most of us on this voyage never learn, but can never quite forget, is that to win is sometimes to lose. -Richard M. Nixon

Success is overrated. Incompetence is what we should revere it marks us off from animals. -Stephen Pile

Success is the result of behavior that completely contradicts the usual expectations about the behavior of a successful person. -Felix R. Paturi

Success makes us intolerant of failure, and failure makes us intolerant of success.
-William Feather

Success provides more opportunities to say things than the number of things a pundit has worth saying. -Douglas Pike

Support organizations can always prove success by showing service to someone … not necessarily you. -Douglas Evelyn

The amount of success is in inverse proportion to the effort in attaining success.
-Felix R. Paturi

The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right. -Edward Simmons

The success of any venture will be helped by prayer, even in the wrong denomination. -Charles P. Boyle

There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who prosper by the old order. -Italo Bombolini

Vacillating people seldom succeed. They seldom win the solid respect of their fellow men. Successful men and women are very careful in reaching decisions and very persistent and determined in action thereafter. -L. G. Elliott

What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts not the facts themselves. -Jerome Cohen

When a man blames others for his failures, it’s a good idea to credit others with his successes. -Howard W. Newton

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.
-Jean Giraudoux

Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong. -Adolf Hitler

There is only one success, to be able to spend your life in your own way.
-Christopher Morley

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing. -Napoleon

If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure. -J. Danforth Quayle

Given the choice of friendship or success, I’d probably choose success. -Sting

Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture. -Charles Caleb Colton

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. -Henty Wadsworth Longfellow

The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves. -Herbert N. Casson

How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success. -Anne Sophie Swetchine

The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at. -Don Marquis

There is no such thing as a self-made man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the makeup of our character and our thoughts, as well as our success. -George Matthew Adams

Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good. -Joe Paterno

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
-George Bernard Shaw

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. -Benjamin Disreali

We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife. -Groucho Marx

The meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights. -J Paul Getty

Nothing recedes like success. -Walter Winchell

Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.
-Jim Backus

There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success. -Max Beerbohm

To be a successful father there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years. -Ernest Hemingway

Behind every successful man stands an amazed woman. -Anon

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and only eating the top half of each one. -Barbra Streisand

If you become a success, you don’t change everyone else does. -Kirk Douglas

The worst part of having success is to try finding someone who is happy for you.
-Bette Midler

Success is being nothing but a quote. -Andy Partridge

We must believe in luck for how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like? -Jean Cocteau

Success is one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. -Irving Berlin

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral. -Rosalind Russell

Moderation is a fatal thing nothing succeeds like excess. -Oscar Wilde

Why be a man when you can be a success? -Bertold Brecht

Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. -Lilly Tomlin

Pubs make you as drunk as they can as soon as they can, and turn nasty when they succeed. -Colin MacInnes

Who begins too much accomplishes little. -German Proverb

A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. -Homer

It is not enough to aim, you must hit. -Italian Proverb

Mighty rivers can easily be leaped at their source. -Publilius Syrus

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest accomplishment is not in never falling, but in rising again after you fall. -Vince Lombardi

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day. -Albert Schweitzer

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. -Booker T. Washington

If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero. -David Ellis

The successful person is the individual who forms the habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do. -Donald Riggs

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit.
-Dwight Morrow

Success is relevant to coping with obstacles… But no problem is ever solved by those, who, when they fail, look for someone to blame instead of something to do.
-Fred Waggoner

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success. -Henry Ford

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. -Henry Ward Beecher

It is better to fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than to succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail. -Peter Marshall

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. -H. L. Mencken

If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average. -M.H. Alderson

If we learn for each success, and each failure, and improve ourselves through this process, then, at the end, we will have fulfilled our potential and performed well.
-Dr. Porsche

Success, as I see it, is a result, not a goal. -Gustave Flaubert

Success is that old ABC — ability, breaks and courage. -Charles Luckman

There is a time in the tides of men, Which, taken at its flood, leads on to success. On the other hand, don’t count on it.-T.K. Lawson

There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home. -Mark Twain

To establish ourselves in the world, we have to do all we can to appear established. To succeed in the world, we do everything we can to appear successful. -Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We have seen too much success to have become obsessed with failure. -Lyndon B. Johnson

The successful leader does not talk down to people. He lifts them up. -Richard M. Nixon

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
-Robert Benchley

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
– George S. Patton(1885-1945), American military leader
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
– John Naisbitt
We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.
– Lyndon B. Johnson
Happiness is not something you experience, it is something you remember.
– Oscar Levant
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
– Marilyn vos Savant

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.
– Raymond Inmon
If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than to our strength.
– La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), French epigramist
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
– Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915
What you were yesterday is fixed for always, making its mark on what you are today, what you will be tomorrow.
– from The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, mystery novelist
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
– Booker T. Washington
It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.
– Whitney Young
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
– Ray Bradbury
iamhere
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it
– Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian dramatist
Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
– Saint Francis of Assisi
The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.
– Henry S. Haskins
Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in a foul oyster.
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616),Â As You Like ItÂ 1596-1600, act I, sc. IV
If you build it, he will come.
– William P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe [1982]
(basis for the movie Field of Dreams)
Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
– Dorothy Parker, on herself
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
– John Ruskin
Everything I need to know is revealed to me. Everything I need comes to me. All is well in my life.
– Louise Hay
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
– Edith Warton
A woman is like a tea bag — only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.
– Nancy Reagan

1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.
2. Get mad, then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done!
5. Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.
8. Check small things.
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision.
12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
– General Colin Powell’s Rules to Live By

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus, novelist
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
– George Santayana
Let us not look back in anger, or forward with fear, but around in awareness.
– James Thurber (1894- 1961)
Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity. You can only achieve happiness if you are too busy living your life to notice whether you are happy or not.
– Frank Pittman III, MD, 62, psychiatrist, author of Grow Up!
Do the things that you’ve always dreamed of doing NOW. Don’t postpone them. My dad loved to be in the outdoors, but he was always so busy as a school principal that he didn’t give himself that pleasure very often. He was going to do all his fishing and hiking when he retired, but he never lived that long. He died of cancer at 63. It was pretty wrenching to not only see him suffer so badly but also to realize that he had been cheated out of his dream.
– Fred Matheny, 53, writer, former English teacher
Dream lofty dreams and as you dream, so shall you become.
– James Allen
Leap and the net will appear.
– Julia Cameron
We do not believe in immortality because we can’t prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.
– Harriet Martineau
Only a life lived for others is worth living.
– Albert Einstein

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
– In On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered by G.K. Chesterton
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community… and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
– George Bernard Shaw, Irish Playwright
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
– George Bernard Shaw,Â Mrs. Warren’s Profession,Â 1893
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
– Helen Keller
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden,
But you will grow if you are sick,
If you are in pain, if you experience losses,
And if you do not put your head in the sand,
But take the pain as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.
– Elizabeth Kubler Ross

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our greatest battles are that with our own minds.
– Jameson Frank
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
– Henry Van Dyke
The importance of humility. We need the humility to know that truth can be ephemeral, that this can be but one version of the truth.
– Ken Auletta, journalist and author
We attract hearts by the qualities we display; we retain them by the qualities we possess.
– Jean Baptiste Antoine Suard, French journalist (1734-1817)
Every time I stepped on the field, I believed my team was going to walk off the winner, somehow, someway.
– Roger Staubach, NFL Quarterback and Sports Broadcaster
I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you’ll win–if you don’t, you won’t.
– Bruce Jenner, Olympic Gold Medalist, Decathlon
One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.
– Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, NBA Center
I think every person should be able to enjoy life. Try to decide what you most enjoy doing, and then look around to see if there is a job for which you could prepare yourself that would enable you to continue having this sort of joy.
– Linus Pauling, scientist Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, California
Have confidence in your decisions. Make them expeditiously, and stay with them as long as you believe you are correct no matter what others say. However, when you conclude you were in error, do not hesitate to announce the error publicly and change course.
– Edward J. Koch, former mayor of New York City
The purpose of life is not to win. The purpose of life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people’s lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them.
– Rabbi Harold Kushner, Massachusetts
Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.
– James Thurber (1894-1961), U.S. humorist
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone.
– Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)
Humor is not merely the telling of funny stories. It recognizes the vast difference between life as we imagine it and life as we live it, and between the fanciful and imposing impressions we have of ourselves and what we actually are.
– Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984). 4 April, Once Around the Sun, 1951
I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
– Rita Rudner
Television has brought back murder into the home — where it belongs.
– Alfred Hitchcock, in Observer 19 Dec. 1965
1. Patients must be dead before the organs are taken.
2. Although patients may be allowed to die under certain circumstances, they must never actively be killed.
3. Patient or family consent must precede organ retrieval.
– University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Medical Ethics’ Guide to Organ Procurement
This is not an easy time for humorists because the government is far funnier than we are.
– Art Buchwald, speech, 1987
I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.
– Dan Quayle, former Vice President of the United State of America
It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.
– Dan Quayle, former Vice President of the United State of America
He laughs best who laughs last.
– John Heywood (c.1497-c.1580)
He laughs best whose laugh lasts.
– Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990), 11 January, Peter’s Almanac, 1982
He who laughs, lasts!
– Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole, 1938
It’s like deja vu all over again.
– Yogi Berra
If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.
– Yogi Berra
He must have made that before he died.
– Yogi Berra, upon seeing a Steve McQueen movie
That’s All Folks!
The Man of a Thousand Voices
– Mel Blanc’s Epitaph
For seven and a half years I’ve worked alongside President Reagan. We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex … uh…setbacks.
– George Bush, former President of the United States of America
This is a great day for France!
de– Richard Nixon, while attending Charles De Gaulle’s funeral
When humor is meant to be taken seriously, it’s no joke.
– Lionel Strachey (1864-1927)
My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
– Ronald Reagan, about to go on the air for a radio broadcast, unaware that the microphone was already on.
We’re not lost. We’re locationally challenged.
– John M. Ford
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say ‘elevator’, we say ‘lift’ … they say ‘President’, we say ’stupid psychopathic git’
– Alexi Sayle
The cable TV sex channels don’t expand our horizons, don’t make us better people and don’t come in clearly enough.
– Bill Maher
Bite the wax tadpole.
– Coca-Cola as originally translated into Chinese
You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
– In a Japanese Hotel
Smoking kills, and if you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.
– Anti-smoking spokesperson Brooke Shields
Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
– Emo Phillips
I couldn’t tell if the streaker was a man or a woman because it had a bag on it’s head.
– Yogi Berra
You got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
– Yogi Berra
I want to get a tatoo of myself on my entire body, only 2Â taller.
– Steven Wright
So when somebody has B.O., theÂ OÂ usually stays with theÂ B . Once theÂ BÂ leaves, theÂ OÂ goes with it.
Jerry Seinfeld, inÂ The Smelly Car
As she lay there dozing next to me, one voice inside my head kept saying,Â Relax… you are not the first doctor to sleep with one of his patients,Â Â but another kept reminding me, ‘Howard, you are a veterinarian.’
– Dick Wilson
“Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you recognise a mistake when you make it again.”
-Â Â Â Franklin P. Jones
Mathematics
It’s generaly false that within 2 points goes a straight line. Excepted, of course, if the 2 points are exactly facing each others.
In numerical analysis, you can have 2+2 = 5, for 2 big enough and 5 small enough.

A mathematician nightmare would be an epsilon going toward infinity when n goes toward zero.

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. lim ( sqrt(8) ) = 3
8->9
A topologist is a man who doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

97.3% of all statistics are made up.

It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger then the previous record.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. (Niels Bohr)

Before I die, I hope that someone will explain quantum mechanics to me. After I die, I hope that God will explain turbulence to me. (W. Heisenberg)

The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.

Half of the people in the world are below average.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is.

The light at the end of the tunnel is usually a “No Exit” sign.

Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.

The speed of time is one second per second.

Life is complex. It has real and imaginary components.

If parallel lines meet at infinity - infinity must be a very noisy place with all those lines crashing together !

The average human has one testical and one breast and less that two legs…

Science is Truth; don’t be misled by facts.

Points have no parts or joints. How then can they combine To form a line?

God made the natural integers numbers. The others, were man-made. (Weierstrass)

Math is like love — a simple idea but it can get complicated. Black Holes sucks…

Theoretical Physics is a science locally isomorphic to Mathematics.

A probability is a desperate attempt of chaos to become stable. Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero. At first, God said :
Rot E = -dB/dt
Div D = rho
Div B = 0
Rot H = j + dD/dt
and there was the light. (J.C. Maxwell)

Whatever the missing mass of the universe is, I hope it’s not cockroaches.

Absolute zero is *cool*.

What is a quantum particle? The dreams that stuff is made of…

“Here Kitty,Kitty” (Schrodinger)

Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love. (Albert Einstein)

A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

Chemists are the *cleanest* people you’ll ever meet… they wash their hands even *before* they go to the restroom!

Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.

The must incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. (Albert Einstein)

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18. (Albert Einstein)

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. (Albert Einstein)

Experimental confirmation of a prediction is merely a measurement. An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery. (Enrico Fermi)

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
–Donald Laird

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
–Sir John Lubbock

No one does anything from a single motive.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Motivation is like food for the brain. You cannot get enough in one sitting. It needs continual and regular top up s.
–Peter Davies

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

The mechanics of industry is easy. The real engine is the people : Their motivation and direction.
–Ken Gilbert

You cannot raise a man up by calling him down.
–William Boetcker

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.
–Harriet Braiker

Nobody motivates today’s workers. If it doesn’t come from within, it doesn’t come. Fun helps remove the barriers that allow people to motivate themselves.
–Herman Cain

Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.
–John Wooden

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
–Frank Outlaw

I’ve always felt it was not up to anyone else to make me give my best.
–Akeem Olajuwon

You are what you think. You are what you go for. You are what you do!
–Bob Richards

I never criticize a player until they are first convinced of my unconditional confidence in their abilities.
–John Robinson

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
–Unknown

Why did I want to win? because I didn’t want to lose!
–Max Schmelling

The most important thing about motivation is goal setting. You should always have a goal.
–Francie Larrieu Smith

I still feel like I gotta prove something. There are a lot of people hoping I fail. But I like that. I need to be hated.
–Howard Stern

There is nothing that fear and hope does not permit men to do.
–Marquis De Vauvenargues

This time like all times is a very good one if we but know what to do with it
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching.
–George Van Valkenburg

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.
–Frank A. Clark

Quotes by Ernest Hemingway

Never mistake motion for action.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
What is moral is what you feel good after.
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Grace under pressure. - Definition of “guts”
Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools

The road to success is always under construction.
–Unknown

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is for you.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good that we oft may win, By fearing to attempt
–William Shakespeare

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious
–Unknown

Listen a hundred times, Ponder a thousand times, Speak once!”
–Unknown

Private victories precede public victories
–S. R. Covey

Ones best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
–Henry Ward Beecher

Behind every successful man there’s a lot of unsuccessful years.
–Bob Brown

It takes twenty years to become an overnight success.
–Eddie Cantor

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out…
–Robert Collier

Success… it’s what you do with what you’ve got.
–Leroy Van Dyke

Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
–T. S. Eliot

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.”
–Mike Adams

Love is a matter of Chemistry, but sex is a matter of Physics
–Unknown

If it’s green, it’s biology, If it stinks, it’s chemistry, If it has numbers, it’s math, If it doesn’t work, it’s technology.
–Unknown

I had to make some optimistic assumptions to meet the revenue target. In week three, we’re visited by an alien named D’utox Inag who offers to share his advanced technology.
–Dilbert (Scott Adams)

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s in Hamburger Technology.
–Clive James

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
–Albert Einstein

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place.
–Douglas Adams

The doer alone learneth.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
–Thomas Arnold Bennett

Experience is an asset of which no worker can be cheated, no matter how selfish or greedy his immediate employer may be.
–Napolean Hill

Lose this day loitering, ‘Twill be the same story Tomorrow — and the next more dilatory.
Then indecision brings its own delays, and days are lost lamenting overdays! Are you ernest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or dream you can - begin it! Courage has genius, power and magic in it. Only engage, and the mind grows heated. Begin it, and the work will be completed.
–Goethe

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all cost of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
–Thomas Arnold Bennett

If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave. If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.
–Chinese Proverb

I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
–Carl Sandburg

First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.
–Greek Proverb

I lost my job. Actually, I know where it is. Only… when I go back there? They got some -new- guy doin’ it.
–Bob “Bobcat” Goldthwait

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
–Bette Davis

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”
–Robert Frost

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
–Albert Einstein

It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life [that] those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest people.
–Brutus Hamilton

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throwaway the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
–Corrie Ten Boom

If email had been around before the telephone was invented, people would have said, “Hey, forget email! With this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people!”
–The Exectuive Speechwriter Newsletter

The good news: Computers allow us to work 100% faster. The bad news: They generate 300% more work. - Unknown

Optimist: “The glass is half full.”
Pessimist: “The glass is half empty.”
Engineer: “That glass is twice as large as it needs to be.”
–Unkown

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
–Rich Cook

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
–Howard Aiken, IBM engineer

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
–Jane Austen

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
–Albert Camus

“In the end, everything is a gag.”
–Charlie Chaplin

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
–Aldous Huxley

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
–George Bernard Shaw

“It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.”
–Helen Keller

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves–or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
–Ayn Rand

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.
–Erma Bombeck, American Humorist

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.
–Marie Beyon Ray

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”
–George Washington Carver

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
–Buddha

“There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.”
–Hannah Senesh

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens. Circumstances and situations do color life but you have been given the mind to choose what the color shall be.
–John Homer Miller

If I could wish for my life to be perfect, it would be tempting but I would have to decline, for life would no longer teach me anything.
–Allyson Jones

“There are two types of education… One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live.”
–John Adams

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
–Norman MacEwan

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this it the ideal life.
–Mark Twain

Everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room, every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.
–Indian Proverb

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
–Agatha Christie

Life is part positive and part negative. Suppose you went to hear a symphony orchestra and all they played were the little happy high notes. Would you leave soon? Let me hear the rumble of the bass, the crash of the cymbals and the minor keys.
–Jim Rohn

“Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.”
–Scottish Proverb

“Love is life and if you miss love, you miss life.”
–Leo Buscaglia

“Taking joy in life is a woman’s best cosmetic.”
–Rosalind Russell

It ain’t over till it’s over.
–Yogi Berra

‘We the willing, following the unknowing are doing the impossible. We have done so much for so long with so little that we are now able to do anything with nothing
–Unknown

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
–Douglas Adams

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
–Groucho Marx

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
–Abraham Lincoln

Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical
–Yogi Berra

“I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up
–Barbara Bush

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
–Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC

This is like deja vu all over again.
–Yogi Berra

Murphy’s Laws (as posted in Arizona Humor)
Murphy’s First Law: Nothing is as easy as it looks.
Murphy’s Second Law: Everything takes longer than you think.
Murphy’s Third Law: In any field of endeavor, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Murphy’s Fourth Law: If there is a possibility that several things can go wrong, then the one that will cause the greatest damage will be the one to go wrong.
Murphy’s Fifth Law: If anything absolutely can NOT go wrong, it will anyway.
Murphy’s Sixth Law: If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
Murphy’s Seventh Law: Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
Murphy’s Eighth Law: If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
Murphy’s Ninth Law: Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
Murphy’s Tenth Law: Mother Nature is a “son-of-a-gun.”
Murphy’s Eleventh Law: It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so very ingenious.
Murphy’s Twelfth Law: Things get worse under pressure.

A few additions to Murphy’s Laws …
C01: To study a subject best, understand it thoroughly before you start.
C02: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
C03: If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.
C04: When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!

“Somebody has to be in charge”
“We just flew in from Los Angeles, and boy are our arms tired.”
“Everything changes, everything stays the same.”
“The first two years of college are vocabulary lessons. The second two years are spent learning who to ask and where to look it up.”
“When you take dancing lessons, you learn steps and you learn steps and you learn steps. It can go on for a long time. And then one day, you just learn to dance, and it is so different.”
“I’m on a mission from George!”
“Nothing is a problem”
“I have a mind like a steel trap. Stuff gets in there and WHAM! it never gets back out again.”
“Rio Salado? Salad River?”
“Wireless home communications is a marketable product which we have the technology to build”
“Why would I lie about a thing like that?”
“No, I am not the Bill Austin of “Beth and Bill”, I am the famous Bill Austin”
“Hey, I’m a Chemist, remember?”
“People Ask Me, “Why is it free?” and I tell them (really slowly) “Because it doesn’t cost anything.”
“There are no problems, only opportunities”
“There are no opportunities, only problems”
“Nothing is decided”
“Something is decided but no one is talking”
“It has been declared a success, it is a success”
“A priest, a minister and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says … What is this, a joke?”
“Somebody has to be in charge”
“A picture is not worth 1000 words on the Internet. The information is in the text.”
“At Motorola, punishment for success far exceeds punishment for failure.”

You can’t have everything, where would you put it?
–Steven Wright

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
–Abraham Lincoln

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.
–Victor Hugo

I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code. –Emo Phillips

As punishment for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
–Albert Einstein

Women will forgive anything. Otherwise, the race would have died out long ago.
–Robert A. Heinlein

You’ve got bad eating habits if you use a grocery cart in 7-Eleven okay?
–Dennis Miller, american comedian

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
–Carl Jung

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you too, can become great.
–Mark Twain

Ah, but a man’s grasp should exceed his reach, or what’s a Heaven for?
–Robert Browning

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.
–Erin Majors

The day the Lord created hope was probably the same day he created Spring.
–Bern Williams

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
–Thoreau

Hope is the companion of power and the mother of success, For those of us who hope strongest have within us the gift of miracles.
–Sydney Bremer

The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see, and knows what the mind cannot understand.
–Robert Vallett

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
–Eleanor Roosevelt

In the Midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
–Deepak Chopra

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get them, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
–Leo Burnett

Henry Louis Mencken Quotes

A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn’t know.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.
All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous…The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law…that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule–and both commonly succeed, and are right.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas.

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world!
–William Shakespeare

There is always a good side to every situation. Stay optimistic and try to see an opportunity in your calamities, not pessimistic and see calamities in every opportunity
– Unknown

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.
–Michael Althsuler

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good that I can do Or any kindness that I can show Any human being, let me do it now, and not defer it. For I shall not pass this way again.
–Stephen Grellet

You can’t have everything, where would you put it?
–Steven Wright

Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.
–Brooke Shields, american actress (in an interview to become an anti-smoking
spokesperson)

China is a big country with a lot of chinese people living there.
–Former French President, Charles De Gaulle

I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code. –Emo Phillips

As punishment for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.
–Albert Einstein

Women will forgive anything. Otherwise, the race would have died out long ago.
–Robert A. Heinlein

You’ve got bad eating habits if you use a grocery cart in 7-Eleven okay?
–Dennis Miller, american comedian

We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
–Jason Kidd, upon being drafted to the Dallas Mavericks

Jack Handy Quotes

can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
To me, it’s a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, “Hey, can you give me a hand?” You can say, “Sorry, got these sacks.”
Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he’s carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he’s carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you’re drunk.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let’em go, because, man, they’re gone.
If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid seeing yourself in the mirror, because I bet that’s what REALLY throws you into a panic.
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.
Probably the earliest fly swatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.
I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I’d just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.
Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words “mank”and “ind.” What do these words mean? It’s a mystery and that’s why so is mankind.
If you go flying back through time and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it’s probably best to avoid eye contact.
It’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have more money. And I guess that’s what I like about it. It’s easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.
Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
Instead of a trap door, what about a trap window? The guy looks out it, and if he leans too far, he falls out. Wait. I guess that’s like a regular window.
If I ever get real rich, I hope I’m not real mean to poor people, like now.
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights,even if you don’t know what your rights are, or who the person is you’re talking to. Then on the way out, slam the door.
If you’re a cowboy and you’re dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a magazine.
One thing vampire children have to be taught early on is, don’t run with wooden stakes.
Consider the daffodil. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be over here, looking through your stuff.
Sometimes you have to be careful when selecting a new name for yourself. For instance, let’s say you have chosen the nickname “Fly Head.”Normally you would think that “Fly Head” would mean a person who has beautiful swept-back features, as if flying through the air. But think again. Couldn’t it also mean “having a head like a fly”? I’m afraid some people might actually think that.
Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.
I think a good product would be “Baby Duck Hat.” It’s a fake baby duck, which you strap on top of your head. Then you go swimming underwater until you find a mommy duck and her babies, and you join them. Then all of the sudden, you stand up out of the water and roar like Godzilla. Man those ducks really take off! Also Baby Duck Hat is good for parties.
If you ever reach total enlightenment while you’re drinking a beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose.
As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.

Our favourite holding period is forever.
–Warren Buffet

Cut your losses and let your profits run.
–Proverb

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
–General George S. Patton

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
–Henry Ford

The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.
–Theodore Levitt

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing, layout, processes, and procedures.
–Tom Peters

It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.
–Unknown

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
–Peter F. Drucker

Failing organisations are usually over-managed and under-led.
–Warren G. Bennis

There’s No Business Like Show Business.
–Irving Berlin

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters. These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
–Bible, Psalms 107:23

Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
–W. Edwards Deming

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.
–Thomas J. Watson Jr

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. — Chinese Proverb

“Judge not the horse by his saddle.”
- Chinese Proverb

When walking through a melon patch, don’t adjust your sandals.
- Chinese proverb

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
- Chinese Proverb

Don’t build a new ship out of old wood.

He who seeks revenge should remember to dig two graves.

You must have crossed the river before you may tell the crocodile he has bad breath.

If you neglect your art for one day it will neglect you for two - Chinese saying

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be only afraid of standing still - Old Chinese Proverb

To guess is cheap. To guess wrong is expensive. - Old Chinese Proverb

“When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.” Chinese Proverb

“Live your own life, for you will die your own death.” Latin Proverb

“In case of doubt it is best to lean to the side of mercy.” Legal Maxim

“One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.” French Proverb

“The secret of life is not to do what you like, but to like what you do.” American Proverb

“Be not deceived with the first appearance of things, for show is not substance.” English Proverb

“Beware of the man of one book.” Latin Proverb

“Be not made a beggar by banqueting upon borrowing, when thou hast nothing in thy purse.” (In other words, don’t bite more than you can chew, I think.) Apocrypha Ecclesiasticus

“Despise not a small wound, a poor kinsman, or an humble enemy.” English Proverb

“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart, his next to escape the censures of the world.” English Proverb

“He who keeps nose to grindstone, loses face.” Chinese Proverb

“Call on God, but row away from the rocks.” Indian Proverb

“If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep.” Yiddish Proverb

“Make not the sauce ’til you have caught the fish.” English Proverb

“If Fate does not adjust itself to you, adjust yourself to Fate.” Persian Proverb

“If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your fault.” Arab Proverb

“Don’t drown the man who taught you to swim.” English Proverb

“Break the legs of an evil custom.” Italian Proverb

“Do not be in a hurry to tie what you cannot untie.” English Proverb

“Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles.” Arab Proverb

“Don’t dig your grave with your own knife and fork.” English Proverb

“If you can’t go over, you must go under.” Jewish Proverb

“When you want to test the depth of a stream, don’t use both feet.” Chinese Proverb

“When the fox preaches, look to the geese.” German Proverb

“Be honorable with yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.” Welsh Proverb

“Listen, or thy tongue will make thee deaf.” Native American Proverb

“One kind word can warm three winter months.” Japanese Proverb

“He is rich who owes nothing.” Hungarian Proverb

Groucho Marx 1890-1977

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Room service? Send up a larger room.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Ice Water? Get some Onions - that’ll make your eyes water!

You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?

You’ve got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I’ll bet he was glad to get rid of it.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

Why should I care about posterity? What’s posterity ever done for me?

Why, I’d horse-whip you if I had a horse.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

It is better to have loft and lost than to never have loft at all.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

Remember men, we’re fighting for this woman’s honour; which is probably more than she ever did.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

Time wounds all heels.

Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!

As soon as I get through with you, you’ll have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife.

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.
Aesop
Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
Aesop
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
Put your shoulder to the wheel.
Aesop, Hercules and the Wagoner
The gods help them that help themselves.
Aesop, Hercules and the Wagoner
Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
Aesop, Juno and the Peacock
It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.
Aesop, The Ant and the Grasshopper
Union gives strength.
Aesop, The Bundle of Sticks
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
Aesop, The Dog and the Shadow
People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
Aesop, The Dog in the Manger
The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle’s own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow
I am sure the grapes are sour.
Aesop, The Fox and the Grapes
Familiarity breed contempt.
Aesop, The Fox and the Lion
Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction.
Aesop, The Frog and the Ox
Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find - nothing.
Aesop, The Goose with the Golden Eggs
Slow and steady wins the race.
Aesop, The Hare and the Tortoise
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
Aesop, The Jay and the Peacock
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop, The Lion and the Mouse
While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemy’s toils than out again.
Aesop, The Lion, the Fox, and the Beasts
I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath.
Aesop, The Man and the Satyr
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
Aesop, The Milkmaid and Her Pail
We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
Aesop, The Old Man and Death
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Aesop, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop, The Wolf and the Lamb
Appearances often are deceiving.
Aesop, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
Napoleon Bonaparte
The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Victory belongs to the most persevering.
Napoleon Bonaparte
[Medicine is] a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.
Napoleon Bonaparte
History is more or less bunk.
Henry Ford
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
Henry Ford
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.
Henry Ford
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
People can have the Model T in any colour–so long as it’s black.
Henry Ford
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Henry Ford
History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we made today.
Henry Ford, Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25th, 1916
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Henry David Thoreau
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Henry David Thoreau
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Henry David Thoreau
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Henry David Thoreau
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Henry David Thoreau
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Henry David Thoreau
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
Thank God men cannot as yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Henry David Thoreau
That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau
What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
Henry David Thoreau
[Water is] the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
Henry David Thoreau, ‘Economy,’ Walden, 1854
He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul’s estate.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, February 11, 1840
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, January 21, 1838
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, July 25, 1839
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Conclusion, 1854
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Economy, 1854
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Higher Laws, 1854
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Reading, 1854
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
He who knows does not speak.
He who speaks does not know.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
He who knows others is wise;
He who know himself is enlightened.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
I have three treasures. Guard and keep them:
The first is deep love,
The second is frugality,
And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world.
Because of deep love, one is courageous.
Because of frugality, one is generous.
Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
The best [man] is like water.
Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in [lowly] places that all disdain.
This is why it is so near to Tao.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
The more laws and order are made prominent,
The more thieves and robbers there will be.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.
Through this I know the advantage of taking no action.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
The Way of Heaven is to benefit others and not to injure.
The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is not greater disaster than greed.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
To be worn out is to be renewed.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
To have little is to possess.
To have plenty is to be perplexed.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
To produce things and to rear them,
To produce, but not to take possession of them,
To act, but not to rely on one’s own ability,
To lead them, but not to master them -
This is called profound and secret virtue.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
When armies are mobilized and issues are joined,
The man who is sorry over the fact will win.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
When the highest type of men hear Tao,
They diligently practice it.
When the average type of men hear Tao,
They half believe in it.
When the lowest type of men hear Tao,
They laugh heartily at it.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty,
There arises the recognition of ugliness.
When they all know the good as good,
There arises the recognition of evil.
Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
G. K. Chesterton
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G. K. Chesterton
Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G. K. Chesterton
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
G. K. Chesterton
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G. K. Chesterton
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
G. K. Chesterton, Flying Inn (1914)
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
G. K. Chesterton, Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Sir Winston Churchill
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.
Sir Winston Churchill
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
Sir Winston Churchill
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Sir Winston Churchill
I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Sir Winston Churchill
I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
Sir Winston Churchill
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Sir Winston Churchill
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Sir Winston Churchill
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Sir Winston Churchill
It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped on link at a time.
Sir Winston Churchill
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.
Sir Winston Churchill
Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Sir Winston Churchill
One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.
Sir Winston Churchill
Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Sir Winston Churchill
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
The price of greatness is responsibility.
Sir Winston Churchill
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
Sir Winston Churchill
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Sir Winston Churchill
We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire…Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Sir Winston Churchill, BBC radio broadcast, Feb 9, 1941
The British nation is unique in this respect. They are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, June 10, 1941
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, May 13, 1940
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947
So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-poweruful to be impotent.
Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 12, 1936
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life (1930)
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
Sir Winston Churchill, Radio speech, 1939
Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt… We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Sir Winston Churchill, Radio speech, 1941
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.
Sir Winston Churchill, Second World War (1948)
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943
For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
Sir Winston Churchill, speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, London, November 9, 1954
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in March 1946
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942
We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
Sir Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, July 14, 1940
A love of tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril; but the new view must come, the world must roll forward.
Sir Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, November 29, 1944
Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.
Confucius
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
Confucius
He who will not economize will have to agonize.
Confucius
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
Confucius
The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved.
Confucius
To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.
Confucius
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius
When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
Confucius
Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
He with whom neither slander that gradually soaks into the mind, nor statements that startle like a wound in the flesh, are successful may be called intelligent indeed.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
I have not seen a person who loved virtue, or one who hated what was not virtuous. He who loved virtue would esteem nothing above it.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
If a man withdraws his mind from the love of beauty, and applies it as sincerely to the love of the virtuous; if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength; if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life; if in his intercourse with his friends, his words are sincere - although men say that he has not learned, I will certainly say that he has.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! Virtue is at hand.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The cautious seldom err.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The superior man cannot be known in little matters, but he may be entrusted with great concerns. The small man may not be entrusted with great concerns, but he may be known in little matters.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
The superior man…does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth…lust. When he is strong…quarrelsomeness. When he is old…covetousness.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Things that are done, it is needless to speak about…things that are past, it is needless to blame.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue…[They are] gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Virtue is more to man than either water or fire. I have seen men die from treading on water and fire, but I have never seen a man die from treading the course of virtue.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the mean man seeks is in others.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
When a man’s knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have gained, he will lose again.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
When we see men of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve spirits [of the dead]?…While you do not know life, how can you know about death?
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow - I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
[The superior man] acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve spirits [of the dead]?…While you do not know life, how can you know about death?
Confucius, The Confucian Analects, bk. 11:11
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson
Determine never to be idle…It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
Thomas Jefferson
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
Thomas Jefferson
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Thomas Jefferson
Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment.
Thomas Jefferson
Never spend your money before you have it.
Thomas Jefferson
Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself.
Thomas Jefferson
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
Thomas Jefferson
Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson
The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
Thomas Jefferson
We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.
Thomas Jefferson
I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Count Diodati, 1807
Health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to his cousin John Garland Jefferson, June 11, 1790
If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Lewis, Jr., May 9, 1798
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Melish, January 13, 1813
Do thou restrain the haughty spirit in thy breast, for better far is gentle courtesy.
Homer
It is equally offensive to speed a guest who would like to stay and to detain one who is anxious to leave.
Homer
A companion’s words of persuasion are effective.
Homer, The Iliad
A councilor ought not to sleep the whole night through, a man to whom the populace is entrusted, and who has many responsibilities.
Homer, The Iliad
A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases.
Homer, The Iliad
A multitude of rulers is not a good thing. Let there be one ruler, one king.
Homer, The Iliad
Even when someone battles hard, there is an equal portion for one who lingers behind, and in the same honor are held both the coward and the brave man; the idle man and he who has done much meet death alike.
Homer, The Iliad
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer, The Iliad
He knew the things that were and the things that would be and the things that had been before.
Homer, The Iliad
He lives not long who battles with the immortals, nor do his children prattle about his knees when he has come back from battle and the dread fray.
Homer, The Iliad
I too shall lie in the dust when I am dead, but now let me win noble renown.
Homer, The Iliad
If you are very valiant, it is a god, I think, who gave you this gift.
Homer, The Iliad
It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals.
Homer, The Iliad
It is not possible to fight beyond your strength, even if you strive.
Homer, The Iliad
It is not unseemly for a man to die fighting in defense of his country.
Homer, The Iliad
It was built against the will of the immortal gods, and so it did not last for long.
Homer, The Iliad
Miserable mortals who, like leaves, at one moment flame with life, eating the produce of the land, and at another moment weakly perish.
Homer, The Iliad
Of men who have a sense of honor, more come through alive than are slain, but from those who flee comes neither glory nor any help.
Homer, The Iliad
Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it.
Homer, The Iliad
The fates have given mankind a patient soul.
Homer, The Iliad
The glorious gifts of the gods are not to be cast aside.
Homer, The Iliad
The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.
Homer, The Iliad
The single best augury is to fight for one’s country.
Homer, The Iliad
There is a fullness of all things, even of sleep and love.
Homer, The Iliad
There is a strength in the union even of very sorry men.
Homer, The Iliad
Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals: that they live in grief while they themselves are without cares; for two jars stand on the floor of Zeus of the gifts which he gives, one of evils and another of blessings.
Homer, The Iliad
Whoever obeys the gods, to him they are particularly listen.
Homer, The Iliad
You will certainly not be able to take the lead in all things yourself, for to one man a god has given deeds of war, and to another the dance, to another lyre and song, and in another wide-sounding Zeus puts a good mind.
Homer, The Iliad
Young men’s minds are always changeable, but when an old man is concerned in a matter, he looks both before and after.
Homer, The Iliad
Zeus does not bring all men’s plans to fulfillment.
Homer, The Iliad
A small rock holds back a great wave.
Homer, The Odyssey
A young man is embarrassed to question an older one.
Homer, The Odyssey
All men have need of the gods.
Homer, The Odyssey
All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.
Homer, The Odyssey
Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.
Homer, The Odyssey
By their own follies they perished, the fools.
Homer, The Odyssey
Dreams surely are difficult, confusing, and not everything in them is brought to pass for mankind. For fleeting dreams have two gates: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those which pass through the one of sawn ivory are deceptive, bringing tidings which come to nought, but those which issue from the one of polished horn bring true results when a mortal sees them.
Homer, The Odyssey
Even his griefs are a joy long after to one that remembers all that he wrought and endured.
Homer, The Odyssey
Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift.
Homer, The Odyssey
For rarely are sons similar to their fathers: most are worse, and a few are better than their fathers.
Homer, The Odyssey
I should rather labor as another’s serf, in the home of a man without fortune, one whose livelihood was meager, than rule over all the departed dead.
Homer, The Odyssey
It is equally wrong to speed a guest who does not want to go, and to keep one back who is eager. You ought to make welcome the present guest, and send forth the one who wishes to go.
Homer, The Odyssey
It is tedious to tell again tales already plainly told.
Homer, The Odyssey
Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.
Homer, The Odyssey
May the gods grant you all things which your heart desires, and may they give you a husband and a home and gracious concord, for there is nothing greater and better than this
-when a husband and wife keep a household in oneness of mind, a great woe to their enemies and joy to their friends, and win high renown.
Homer, The Odyssey
Nothing feebler than a man does the earth raise up, of all the things which breathe and move on the earth, for he believes that he will never suffer evil in the future, as long as the gods give him success and he flourishes in his strength; but when the blessed gods bring sorrows too to pass, even these he bears, against his will, with steadfast spirit, for the thoughts of earthly men are like the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them.
Homer, The Odyssey
So it is that the gods do not five all men gifts of grace - neither good looks nor intelligence nor eloquence.
Homer, The Odyssey
The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city, observing the wrongdoing and the righteousness of men.
Homer, The Odyssey
The minds of the everlasting gods are not changed suddenly.
Homer, The Odyssey
The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.
Homer, The Odyssey
There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
Homer, The Odyssey
There is nothing more dread and more shameless than a woman who plans such deeds in her heart as the foul deed which she plotted when she contrived her husband’s murder.
Homer, The Odyssey
We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.
Homer, The Odyssey
Wide-sounding Zeus takes away half a man’s worth on the day when slavery comes upon him.
Homer, The Odyssey
You ought not to practice childish ways, since you are no longer that age.
Homer, The Odyssey
Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.
Charles M. Schulz
I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.
Charles M. Schulz
I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I’m in the wrong building.
Charles M. Schulz
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?
Charles M. Schulz
No problem is so formidable that you can’t walk away from it.
Charles M. Schulz
There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
Charles M. Schulz
Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There’s so little hope for advancement.
Charles M. Schulz (Snoopy)
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
George Bernard Shaw
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
George Bernard Shaw
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw
Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
George Bernard Shaw
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’
John F. Kennedy
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
John F. Kennedy
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
John F. Kennedy
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we’d been saying they were.
John F. Kennedy
…probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.
John F. Kennedy, Describing a dinner for Nobel Prize winners, 1962
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, 1962
And so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, 1961
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address, 1961
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
John F. Kennedy, speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
John F. Kennedy, speech in Dublin, Ireland, June 28, 1963
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
John F. Kennedy, speech prepared for delivery in Dallas the day of his assassination, November 22, 1963
Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
John F. Kennedy, Speech to UN General Assembly, Sept. 25, 1961
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
College isn’t the place to go for ideas.
Helen Keller
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.
Helen Keller
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
Helen Keller
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.
Helen Keller
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
Helen Keller
The highest result of education is tolerance.
Helen Keller, ‘Optimism,’ 1903
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but is has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller, My Religion, 1927
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King Jr.
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Martin Luther King Jr.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Strength to Love,’ 1963
The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.
Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Strength to Love,’ 1963
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963
Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King Jr., Speech at St. Louis, March 22, 1964
I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Martin Luther King Jr., Speech in Detroit, June 23, 1963
…And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.
Martin Luther King Jr., Speech in Memphis, April 3, 1968, the day before King was assassinated
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry Kissinger
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
Henry Kissinger
The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mould reality in the light of their purposes.
Henry Kissinger
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Henry Kissinger, Wilson Library Bulletin, March 1979
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
H. L. Mencken
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
H. L. Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
H. L. Mencken
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.
H. L. Mencken
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
H. L. Mencken
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H. L. Mencken
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
H. L. Mencken
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. Mencken
Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.
H. L. Mencken
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
H. L. Mencken
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H. L. Mencken
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
H. L. Mencken, ‘Prejudices: Fourth Series,’ 1924
For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong
H. L. Mencken, Mencken’s Metalaw
Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.
Mahatma Gandhi
As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.
Mahatma Gandhi
Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
Mahatma Gandhi
I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Mahatma Gandhi
One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
Mahatma Gandhi
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mahatma Gandhi
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Mahatma Gandhi, ‘Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13,’ May 3, 1919

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein
Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.
Albert Einstein
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
Albert Einstein
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
Albert Einstein
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.
Albert Einstein
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge…
Albert Einstein
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
Albert Einstein
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Albert Einstein
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Albert Einstein
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein, “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium”, 1941
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein, ‘Out of My Later Years,’ 1950
It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.
Albert Einstein, ‘Treasury for the Free World,’ 1946
At any rate, I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.
Albert Einstein, In a letter to Max Born, 1926
If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
Albert Einstein, Observer, Jan. 15, 1950
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein, Telegram, 24 May 1946
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you appeal to force, there’s one thing you must never do - lose.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you are in any contest you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, September 11, 1956
Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech to the Republican National Committee, January 31, 1958
We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, April 2, 1957
Children are all foreigners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t wast yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give all to love; obey thy heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world belongs to the energetic.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Art,’ 1841
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Journals,’ 1836
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series: Prudence, 1841
The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1839
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Progress of Culture, 1876
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: Quotation and Originality, 1876
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Civilization, 1870
A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life; he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude: Works and Days, 1870
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, ‘Fate,’ 1860
I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.
Dorothy Parker
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.
Dorothy Parker
I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.
Dorothy Parker
If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
Dorothy Parker
If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
Dorothy Parker
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.
Dorothy Parker
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
Dorothy Parker
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant–and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
Dorothy Parker, ‘But the One on the Right,’ in New Yorker, 1929
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
Dorothy Parker, ‘Fair Weather,’ Sunset Gun, 1928
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker, speaking of Katharine Hepburn
Guilt is a rope that wears thin.
Ayn Rand
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
Ayn Rand
Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday…The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.
Ayn Rand
I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1946
It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966
The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964
All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occured to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.
Bertrand Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Bertrand Russell
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Bertrand Russell
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
Bertrand Russell
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
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Aristotle
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
Aristotle
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way…you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
Aristotle
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle
We are what we repeatedly do.
Aristotle
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Aristotle
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.
Aristotle, ‘Nicomachean Ethics’
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
Aristotle, ‘Nicomachean Ethics,’ 325 B.C.
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics
Education is the best provision for old age.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
All men by nature desire knowledge.
Aristotle, Metaphysics
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
It is possible to fail in many ways…while to succeed is possible only in one way.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
One swallow does not make a summer.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
To enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
We make war that we may live in peace.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
We must as second best…take the least of the evils.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals
Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
Aristotle, Physics
A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange…Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.
Aristotle, Politics
Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
Aristotle, Politics
Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
Aristotle, Politics
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle, Politics
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
Aristotle, Politics
It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
Aristotle, Politics
Law is order, and good law is good order.
Aristotle, Politics
Man is by nature a political animal.
Aristotle, Politics
Nature does nothing uselessly.
Aristotle, Politics
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
Aristotle, Politics
They should rule who are able to rule best.
Aristotle, Politics
Well begun is half done.
Aristotle, Politics
A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
Aristotle, Rhetoric
A whole is that which has beginning, middle and end.
Aristotle, Rhetoric
Evil draws men together.
Aristotle, Rhetoric
It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
Aristotle, Rhetoric
As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree’ — probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
Woody Allen
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
Woody Allen
His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
Woody Allen
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
Woody Allen
How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?
Woody Allen
I am at two with nature.
Woody Allen
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen
I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.
Woody Allen
I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
Woody Allen
I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
Woody Allen
I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
Woody Allen
If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.
Woody Allen
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.
Woody Allen
Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought– particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
Woody Allen
It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.
Woody Allen
It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.
Woody Allen
It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better… while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
Woody Allen
It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
Woody Allen
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it’s all over much too soon.
Woody Allen
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
Woody Allen
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen
Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.
Woody Allen
My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
Woody Allen
Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
Woody Allen
On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
Woody Allen
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year and spends very little on office supplies.
Woody Allen
Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.
Woody Allen
The government is unresponsive to the needs of the little man. Under 5′7″, it is impossible to get your congressman on the phone.
Woody Allen
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?
Woody Allen
Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
Woody Allen
To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.
Woody Allen
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Woody Allen
When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.
Woody Allen
Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?
Woody Allen
What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream? Or what’s worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
Woody Allen, “Without Feathers”
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
Isaac Asimov
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
Isaac Asimov
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.
Isaac Asimov
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Isaac Asimov
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’
Isaac Asimov
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
Isaac Asimov
One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Isaac Asimov, Laws of Robotics from I. Robot, 1950
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
Sir Francis Bacon
Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Sir Francis Bacon
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
Sir Francis Bacon
Houses are built to live in, more than to look on; therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
Sir Francis Bacon
In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
Sir Francis Bacon
Knowledge itself is power.
Sir Francis Bacon
Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
Sir Francis Bacon
Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
Sir Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Sir Francis Bacon
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Sir Francis Bacon
Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
Sir Francis Bacon, Essays: Of Building, 1623
Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.
Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605
After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Cato the Elder
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder
I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
Cato the Elder
We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them.
Cato the Elder
I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.
Cato the Elder, from Plutarch, Lives
Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.
Cato the Elder, from Plutarch, Lives
An orator is a good man who is skilled in speaking.
Cato the Elder, from Seneca the Elder, Controversiae
Even though work stops, expenses run on.
Cato the Elder, On Agriculture
A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.
Samuel Johnson
Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
Samuel Johnson
Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.
Samuel Johnson
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.
Samuel Johnson
If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.
Samuel Johnson
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Samuel Johnson
Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
Samuel Johnson
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
Samuel Johnson
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease we must learn first to do with diligence.
Samuel Johnson
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
Samuel Johnson
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
Samuel Johnson
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci
Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
Leonardo da Vinci
As a well-spend day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks
Intellectual passion dries out sensuality.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks
Iron rusts from disue; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
Laurence J. Peter
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
Laurence J. Peter
An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.
Laurence J. Peter
Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.
Laurence J. Peter
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
Laurence J. Peter
Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.
Laurence J. Peter
Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
Laurence J. Peter
If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.
Laurence J. Peter
In spite of the cost of living, it’s still popular.
Laurence J. Peter
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to believe.
Laurence J. Peter
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents’ shortcomings.
Laurence J. Peter
Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.
Laurence J. Peter
Speak when you are angry–and you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
Laurence J. Peter
The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.
Laurence J. Peter
The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
Laurence J. Peter
Everyone rises to their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter, “The Peter Principle”
Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
Laurence J. Peter (and Raymond Hull)
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
Plato
Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.
Plato
They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
Plato
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Plato
You are so young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as judge of the highest matters.
Plato
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
Plato
No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Plato, Dialogues, Apology
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
Plato, Dialogues, Apology
The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
Plato, Dialogues, Apology
You cannot conceive the many without the one.
Plato, Dialogues, Parmenides
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
Plato, Dialogues, Phaedo
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
Plato, Dialogues, Phaedo
The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.
Plato, Dialogues, Phaedo
Friends have all things in common.
Plato, Dialogues, Phaedrus
The greatest penalty of evildoing - namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men.
Plato, Dialogues, Theatetus
You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.
Plato, Dialogues, Theatetus
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
Plato, The Republic
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato, The Republic
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Plato, The Republic
He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
Plato, The Republic
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Plato, The Republic
Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
Plato, The Republic
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato, The Republic
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
Plato, The Republic
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness…This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato, The Republic
The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.
Plato, The Republic
There are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them.
Plato, The Republic
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Plato, The Republic
When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
Plato, The Republic
A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.
Unknown
A gentleman is a man who can play the accordion but doesn’t.
Unknown
A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.
Unknown
A stitch in time would have confused Einstein.
Unknown
A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .
Unknown
Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better.
Unknown
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Unknown
After all is said and done, a lot more will be said than done.
Unknown
All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.
Unknown
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Unknown
An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
Unknown
Anarchy - it’s not the law, it’s just a good idea.
Unknown
Antonym, n.: The opposite of the word you’re trying to think of.
Unknown
Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
Unknown
Anyone who uses the phrase ‘easy as taking candy from a baby’ has never tried taking candy from a baby.
Unknown
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Unknown
Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can’t remember where they leave things.
Unknown
Barnum was wrong - it’s more like every 30 seconds.
Unknown
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
Unknown
Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will suffice.
Unknown

“Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible ”
Colin Powells’ autobiography

5/14/2002 - On Education…

“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” (B.F. Skinner)

On Risk…

“The less you bet, the more you lose when you win.” (Wyatt Earp)
On Reason…

“Reason and the ability to use it are two separate skills.”Â (Franz Grillparzer)
On Character…

“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow.
The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”Â (Abraham Lincoln)

On Determination…

“If one has determination, then things will get done.” (Chinese Proverb)

On Revenge…

“Revenge is sweet but not nourishing.” (Mason Cooley)

On Courage…

“It is courage based on confidence, not daring, and it is confidence based on experience.” (Dr. Jonas Salk)

On Education…

“Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.” (Madeleine L’Engle)

On Creation…

“Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” (E.M. Forster)

On Worry…

“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.” (W.R. Inge)

On the Future…

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

On Obstacles…

“In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.” (Simone de Beauvoir)

On Success…

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” (Bill Cosby)

On Discovery…

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
_____

On Talent…

“No one can arrive from being talented alone. God gives talent, work transforms talent into genius.” (Anna Pavlova)

On Creativity…

“Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training.” (Anna Freud)

On Advice…

“I realize that advice is worth what it costs — that is, nothing.” (Douglas MacArthur)

On Cats…

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.” (Joseph Wood Krutch)

On Decisions…

“No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.” (Issac Asimov)

On Taxes…

“Death and taxes may be certain, but we don’t have to die every year.” (Unknown)

On Music…

“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)

On Communication…

“To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming.” (English Proverb)

On Class…

“The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.” (Cicero)

On Conformity…

“A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.” (Mark Twain)

On Equality…

“All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.” (Plato)

On Life…

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.” (Robert Frost)

On Journeys…

“The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.” (William Hazlitt)

On Failure…

“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” (George Washington Carver)

On Exploration…

“Each generationâ€™s job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generationâ€™s system of values for a new age.” (Frank Pittman)

On Advice…

“Advice is more agreeable in the mouth than in the ear.” (Mason Cooley)

On Justice…

“No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.” (Aristotle)

On Fame…

“What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.” (Leszczynski Stanislaus)

On Time…

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” (Will Rogers)

On People…

“People are like stained-glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in,
their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” (Elizabeth KÃ¼bler-Ross)

On Happiness…

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” (Robert Frost)

On Work…

“The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.” (Thomas Carlyle)

On Heroes…

“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

On Hope…

“When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always be worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad that they have to get better.” (Malcolm Forbes)

On Success…

“There is no such thing as a self-made man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the makeup of our character and our thoughts, as well as our success.” (George Matthew Adams)

On Ability…

“Ability lies in the mind and the heart. To tell your mind to limit your abilities and to ignore the calls of your heart is only disabling yourself.” (Unknown)

On Adversity…

“It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it.” (Sophocles)

On Grief…

“Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.” (Antoine Rivarol)

On Maturity…

“Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for oneâ€™s decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing oneâ€™s own true gifts. It involves thinking about oneâ€™s environment and deciding what one will and wonâ€™t accept.” (Mary Pipher)

On Affection…

“Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

On History…

“A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

On Fortune…

“Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.” (Seneca)

On Boldness…

“Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare
The truth thou hast, that all may share;
Be bold, proclaim it everywhere:
They only live who dare.” (Lewis Morris)

On Giving…

“We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.” (Anne Swetchine)

On Reason…

“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.” (Thomas Paine)

On Art…

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” (Andre Gide)

On Revenge…

“Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.” (Samuel Johnson)

On Love…

“We conceal it from ourselves in vain–we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.” (Blaise Pascal)

On Discretion…

“A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.” (Christian Nestell Bovee)

On Patience…

“Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.” (Johann Von Schiller)

On Honesty…

“I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.” (Michel De Montaigne)

On Luck…

“Luck affects everything. Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it there will be a fish.” (Ovid)

On Peace…

“The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.” (Desiderius Erasmus)

On Wit…

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.” (Mark Twain)

On Humankind…

“Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but one thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect.” (Chief Seattle)

On Imagination…

“There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

On Excellence…

“One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.” (William Hazlitt)

On Ideas…

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.” (Charles Brower)

On Pride…

“In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.” (John Ruskin)

On Happiness…

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” (Robert Frost)

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-Aristotle

> > Every man should get married some time; after all, happiness is not the
> > only thing in life!!
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ———————————————————————-
> > Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should
>be
> > happier than others.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Oscar Wilde
> > ———————————————————————-
> >Â Â Don’t marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Scottish Proverb
> > ———————————————————————-
> > I don’t worry about terrorism. I was married for two years.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Sam Kinison
> > ———————————————————————-
> > A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free.
> > –Anonymous
> > ———————————————————————
> > Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t, they’d
> > be married too.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –H. L. Mencken
> > ———————————————————————
> > Men have a better time than women; for one thing, they marryÂ Â later;
> > for another thing, they die earlier.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –H. L. Mencken
> > ———————————————————————-
> > -Â Â “A man without a woman is like a fish without a bicycle.”
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â - U2
> > ———————————————————————-
> > - Marriage is a three-ring circus:
> >Â Â Â Â Â –engagement ring
> >Â Â Â Â Â —wedding ring
> >Â Â Â Â Â —suffering
> > ———————————————————————
> > When a newly married couple smiles, everyone knows why.
> > When a ten-year married couple smiles, everyone wonders why.
> > ———————————————————————
> > Love is blind but marriage is an eye-opener.
> > ———————————————————————-
> >Â Â Â When a man opens the door of his car for his wife, you can be sureÂ ofÂ one thing: either the car is new or the wife.
> > ———————————————————————
> > I take my wife everywhere, but she keeps finding her wayÂ Â back to > > home always.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ———————————————————————-
> > I asked my wife, “Where do you want to go for our anniversary?” She said, “Somewhere I have never been!” I told her, “How about the kitchen?”
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ——————————————————————
> > We always hold hands.
> > If I let go, she shops.
> > ——————————————————————-
> > My wife was in beauty saloon for two hours.
> > That was only for the estimate.
> >Â Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ——————————————————————-
> > She got a mudpack and looked great for two days.
> > Then the mud fell off.
> >Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ———————————————————————
> > She ran after the garbage truck, yelling, “Am I too late for the garbage?”
> > Following her down the street I yelled, “No, jump in.”
> >Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ——————————————————————–
> > Badd Teddy recently explained to me why he refuses to get to married. He
> > says “the wedding rings look like minature handcuffs…..”
> >Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous
> > ———————————————————————
> > If your dog is barking at the back door and your wifeÂ Â yelling at the frontÂ door, who do you let in first?
> > The Dog of course…at least he’ll shut up after uÂ Â let him in!
> >Â Â Â Â Â –Anonymous

Samuel Butler

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
There are two great rules in life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less of an exception to the general rule.
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world’s.
An apology for the Devil–it must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

Thomas Jefferson

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.
When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
The selfish spirit of commerce, which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.
A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.
If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
The Constitution of the United States is the result of the collected wisdom of our country.
The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.
What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.
I have not observed men’s honesty to increase with their riches.

George Washington

When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.
To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned.
Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth
Abraham Lincoln
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.
Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.
Military glory: the attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood.
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
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 you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause.
Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.
Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity; and none will do it enthusiastically. Posterity has done nothing for us; and theorize on it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.
John F. Kennedy

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.
Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.
Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.
There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.
When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of manâ€™s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as weâ€™d been saying they were.
There is a a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didnâ€™t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isnâ€™t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.
The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.
The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
Iâ€™m always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. (April 1953, Washington, D.C.)
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. (June 1953, Dartmouth College)
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. (May 1954, New York City)
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field. (Sept. 1956, Peoria, Ill.)
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. (Inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1953)
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage. (Jan. 1954)
Like all successful politicians I married above myself.
Lyndon Johnson
It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.
The world has narrowed to a neighborhood before it has broadened to brotherhood.
Son, in politics you’ve got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.
A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. . . . It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. . . . It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.
Harry Truman
Study men, not historians.
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
The atom bomb was no great decision. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.
I would rather have peace in the world than be President.
The buck stops here.
When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isnâ€™t for you. Itâ€™s for the Presidency.
A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician whoâ€™s been dead ten or fifteen years.
If you canâ€™t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.
Theodore Roosevelt
I want to see you shoot the way you shout.
The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.
The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.
It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. . . . The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.
No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.
I wish that all Americans would realize that American politics is world politics.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.
The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.
The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor.
No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.
A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.
When a country is at war we want Congressmen, regardless of party, to back up the government of the United States.
Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.
We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.
The core of our defense is the faith we have in the institutions we defend.
When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security.
Preparation for defense is an inalienable prerogative of a sovereign state.
The American people want their government to act, and not merely to talk, whenever and wherever there is a threat to world peace.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.
Herbert Hoover
The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage.
There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.
The Union has become not merely a physical union of states, but rather a spiritual union in common ideals of our people. Within it is room for every variety of opinion, every possible experiment in social progress. Out of such variety comes growth, but only if we preserve and maintain our spiritual solidarity.
When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.
Economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved.
Above all, we know that although Americans can be led to make great sacrifices, they do not like to be driven.
Bertrand Russell
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Seneca
Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
It is the superfluous things for which men sweat.
The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.
We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.
What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more

Socrates
The unexamined life was not worth living.
Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblance to that truth.
A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies.
Winston Churchill
Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.
If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
The English never draw a line without blurring it.
A fanatic is one who canâ€™t change his mind and wonâ€™t change the subject.
There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. The quotations, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Woody Allen
Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.
I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.
It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
I don’t respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I-I have a tendency to . . . if I get too mellow, I-I ripen and then rot.
Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
In Beverly Hills . . . they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.
Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.
Hey, don’t knock masturbation! It’s sex with someone I love.
I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year . . . for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife–a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it’s being held.

Benjamin Disraeli
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Finality is not the language of politics.
Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Mark Twain
A classic: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Put all your eggs in the one basket and–WATCH THAT BASKET.
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned manâ€™s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me–I always feel that they have not said enough.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
The very ink in which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
True irreverence is disrespect for another manâ€™s god.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a childâ€™s loss of a doll and a kingâ€™s loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another manâ€™s, I mean.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

G.K. Chesterton
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Ernest Hemingway
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.
He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Never confuse movement with action.
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

George Bernard Shaw
I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.
The surest way to ruin a man who doesn’t know how to handle money is to give him some.
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.
The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Arthur Conan Doyle
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
Albert Einstein
God is subtle, but he is not malicious.
If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
The man of science is a poor philosopher.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Pablo Picasso
They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.
You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
Benjamin Franklin
A benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.
I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
Lord Chesterfield
Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings; but those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces: for every woman who is not absolutely ugly, thinks herself handsome.
Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so.
Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.
You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down.
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

Lord Byron
I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
There is something Pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.
The reason that adulation is not displeasing is that, though untrue, it shows one to be of consequence enough, in one way or other, to induce people to lie.
I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.

Harold Macmillan
Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.
Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.
At home you always have to be a politician. When you’re abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.
Power? It’s like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.

Charlie Chaplin
The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.
The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.
I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.
I have no further use for America. I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ was President.
Mae West
A man in love is like a clipped coupon–it’s time to cash in.
A man in the house is worth two in the street.
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
He who hesitates is last.
I believe that it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.
I believe in the single standard for men and women.
I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
It’s hard to be funny when you have to be clean.
It’s not the men in my life that counts–it’s the life in my men.
My advice to those who think they have to take off their clothes to be a star is, once you’re boned, what’s left to create the illusion? Let ‘em wonder. I never believed in givin’ them too much of me.
Personality is the glitter that sends your little gleam across the footlights and the orchestra pit into that big black space where the audience is.
Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they’re doing and saying in films right now just shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no dignity anymore and I think that’s very important.
She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.
The best way to hold a man is in your arms.
There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out.
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
When choosing between two evils, I always like to pick the one I never tried before.
When it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.
When women go wrong, men go right after them.
David Ben-Gurion
After eighty, there are no enemies, only survivors.
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
If the antisemites want to hate, let them hate, and let them go to hell.
In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
Israel’s economic and cultural progress is due to three things: the pioneering spirit that inspires the best of our immigrant and Israeli youth, who respond to the challenge of our desolute areas and the ingathering of the exiles; the feeling of Diaspora Jewry that they are partners in the enterprise of Israel’s resurgence in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people; and the power of science, and technology which Israel unceasingly, and not without success, tries to enhance.
Not the absorption capacity of the land, but the creative ability of a people, is the true yardstick with which we can measure the immigration potentialities of the land.
The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.
The State of Israel will prove itself not by material wealth, not by military might or technical achievement, but by its moral character and human values.
We don’t consider manual work as a curse, or a bitter necessity, not even as a means of making a living. We consider it as a high human function, as the basis of human life, the most dignified thing in the life of the human being, and which ought to be free, creative. Men ought to be proud of it.
Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.
Orson Welles
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.
The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
Everybody denies I am a genius–but nobody ever called me one!
When you are down and out something always turns up–and it is usually the noses of your friends.
Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.
I think we’re a kind of desperation. We’re sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we’re doing is trying to brighten up the place. That’s why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers–because males have got to try and justify their existence.
Only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.
I hate it when people pray on the screen. It’s not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I’m lost. There’s only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that’s sex. You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed–they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

A clever man commits no minor blunders.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
William Blake

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James (1842-1910)

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right
Thomas PaineÂ Â - Common Sense

A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.
Michael Garrett Marino

A prudent question is one half of wisdom.
Francis Bacon

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all!
William Wordsworth

A wise man’s question contains half the answer.
Solomon Ibn Gabriel

Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so.
Chesterfield, Lord

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.
Anonymous

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.Â Â - Cat’s Cradle

Boswell: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind. Johnson: No, Sir, stark insensibility.
Samuel Johnson

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Carl Sagan

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri-Frederic Amiel

Eccentricities of genius.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Every fool knows you can’t touch the stars, but it doesn’t stop a wise man from trying.
Harry Anderson

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.
Konrad Lorenz

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Ful wys is he that can himselven knowe! (Very wise is he that can know himself.)
Chaucer

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas Edison

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not, thus handicapped.
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
Robert Graves

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.
John PeelÂ Â - The Doctor

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
PogoÂ Â , character in “Pogo,” comic strip by Walt Kelly

I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, “I don’t know.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Henry Huxley

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.
Emerson Pugh

If written directions alone would suffice, libraries wouldn’t need to have the rest of the universities attached.
Judith MartinÂ Â , “Miss Manners” columnist and author

Ignorance of one’s misfortunes is clear gain.
Euripides

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.
Robert G. Ingersoll

Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier.
Stanislaw J. Lec

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Arthur C. Clarke

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)Â Â , 1897

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein

Know thyself.
Linnaeus

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Lord Tennyson

Knowledge is limited.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.
Earl of Chesterfield

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.
Ernest Dimnet

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Look alive. Here comes a buzzard.
PogoÂ Â , character in “Pogo,” comic strip by Walt Kelly

Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?
– James Allen (1864-1912), British-born American Essayist

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.
Engineer’s Motto

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James (1842-1910)

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

The truth is more important than the facts.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

The two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison

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 (1872-1970)

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.
Victor Hugo

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Voltaire (1694-1778)

Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
Henrik Tikkanen

We are all either fools or undiscovered geniuses.
Bonnie Lin

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
Johnathan Swift

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Why is it that wherever I go, the resident idiot heads straight for me?
Gwynn Thomas

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber

You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.
Dorothy Parker

You couldn’t get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.
Edward Flaherty

ZEN QUOTES

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either; just #$%^ off and leave me alone.
2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a flat tire.
3. It’s always darkest before dawn. So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper that’s the time to do it.
4. Don’t be irreplaceable; if you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.
5. No one is listening until you make a mistake.
6. Always remember you’re unique, just like everyone else.
7. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
8. It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
9. It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
10. If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
11. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his or her shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
12. If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
13. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat & drink beer all day.
14. If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
15. Don’t squat with your spurs on.
16. If you drink, don’t park; accidents cause people.
17. Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield.
18. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
19. Duct tape is like the force; it has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

“To inspire is an implant…to motivate is an injection…to manipulate is an infection…” — Doug Firebaugh
“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” — Thomas Kempis

IMAGINATION
“There are enough genuine difficulties in life to encounter, don’t allow your imagination to increase the number.” — Neil Eskelin

“History repeats itself over and over again unless we reinvent it imaginatively and sculpt it with bigger, better, and grander ideas.” — Mark Victor Hansen

“Bring me men to match my mountains: Bring me men to match my plains: Men with empires in their purpose and new eras in their brains.” — Thomas Paine

INFLUENCE/ASSOCIATION
“To inspire is an implant…to motivate is an injection…to manipulate is an infection…” — Doug Firebaugh

“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” — Thomas Kempis

“Don’t spend most of your time on the voices that don’t count. Tune out the shallow voices so that you will have more time to tune in the valuable ones.” — Jim Rohn

“Be selective about your external influences. Your multi-dimensional brain is influenced by everything you see, hear, read, smell, touch, feel or say.” — Brian Tracy

INNOVATION
“People who drive change are the subjects of great scrutiny.” — Carleton Fiorina

“Getting outside of the box can not only be fun, it is sometimes necessary for our survival.Â That is what survival training is all about.Â It disrupts our inner programming, the mentality of going through life on ‘auto-pilot’ so that we can readily see bright new possibilities heading our way.” — Gail Pursell Elliott

“Remember that the six most expensive words in business are: ‘We’ve always done it that way.’” — Catherine DeVrye

“Simplify, consolidate, and eliminate tasks.Â Reengineer your work continuously.” — Brian Tracy

INTEGRITY
“The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.” — Zig Ziglar

“Integrity is the foundation upon which all of your other values are built.” — Brian Tracy

“If you want to take the meaning of the word integrity and reduce it to its simplest terms, you’d conclude that a man of integrity is a promise keeper. When he gives you his word. You can take it to the bank. His word is good.” — Bill McCartney

“Integrity is not something that you should have to think about…nor consider doing…but something in the heart that is already done…then you will see long term success.” — Doug Firebaugh

JUST DO IT!
“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” — Norman Schwarzkopf

“Zeal is a volcano, the peak of which the grass of indecisiveness does not grow.” — Khalil Gibran

“Every now and then, somewhere, some place, sometime, you are going to have to plant your feet, stand firm, and make a point about who you are and what you believe in.Â When that time comes, Pat, you simply have to do it.” — Lee Riley (father of Pat Riley, NBA coach)

“Each of us must do massive right thinking, take massive right action and get massive right results, right here, right now.” — Mark Victor Hansen

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”– Charles Dickens

“Two things I ask my daughters to have: The highest respect for all life and unusual kindness.”– Jim Rohn

“If you want a kinder world, then behave with kindness; if you want a peaceful world, make peace within.”– Dan Millman

“Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.” -Charlotte Bronte
“Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales.” -Bryon J. Langenfeld
“If I’ve done anything I’m sorry for, I’m willing to be forgiven.” Edward Westcott
“One should examine oneself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.” -Moliere
“When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us — recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state — our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions — were we truly men of courage . . . were we truly men of judgment . . . were we truly men of integrity . . . were we truly men of dedication?” -JFK
“Criticizing others is a dangerous thing, not so much because you may make mistakes about them, but because you may be revealing the truth about yourself.” -Harold Medina
“There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”-Oscar Wilde
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing… It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain… It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.” -Oriah Mountain Dreamer
“There was one who thought he was above me, and he was above me until he had that thought.” -Elbert Hubbard

Making a mistake and then judging ourselves harshly is like paying compound interest on a bad investment.
– Doc Childre and Howard Martin

Remember, the mind likes to assume it “know what it knows” but often its perceptions are just not accurate. Yet strong judgments are made all the time based on limited information…When we judge someone and then adopt an attitude toward them, that shuts down other possibilities and locks us away from the insight of our hearts.
– Doc Childre and Howard Martin

It’s time to teach ourselves and our children how to care deeply about something, and to have strongly held beliefs and opinions, without judging others. Judgments only end up hurting the one who judges. We recommend that you learn and teach them to Freeze-Frame. Your best course of action invariably comes from the core values of your heart.
– Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
– Mother Teresa

A hasty judgment is a first step to recantation.
– Publilius Syrus

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.
– Rita Mae Brown

Never look down on anybody, unless you are going to help them up.
– Rev. Jesse Jackson

Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold â€” but so does a hard-boiled egg.
– Unknown

The majority of people meet with failure because they lack the persistence to create new plans to take the place of failed plans.
â€“ Mark Victor Hansen
Success in life is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is usually the result of experience. Experience is usually the result of bad judgement.
â€“ Anthony Robbins
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
Isaac Asimov
And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning
Isaac Asimov
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov
Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
Marcus Aurelius
Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.
Marcus Aurelius
Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
Marcus Aurelius
Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
Marcus Aurelius

Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.
Marcus Aurelius

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius

A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.
Marcus Aurelius

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
Voltaire
Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.
Brian Adams

Patience is the greatest of all virtues.
Cato the Elder (234 BC - 149 BC)

A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.
Dutch Proverb

Our patience will achieve more than our force.
Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - ), “A Wreath of Roses”

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.
George Jackson (1941 - 1971)

The fates have given mankind a patient soul.
Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.
Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727)

Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.

Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

Anthony Robbins

The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.

Jan Patocka

Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.

Tyron Edwards

Every man is the architect of his own life. He builds it just the way he wants it. However, after he has built what he wants, he sometimes decides that he doesn’t like what he has built and looks for someone or something to blame instead of changing himself.

Sidney Madwed

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Henry Miller

No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

Francois Muriac

Nature is at work.. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

David Seabury

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

John F. Kennedy

‘It is destiny’ - phrase of the weak human heart! ‘It is destiny’ - dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Choice, not chance, determines destiny.
Source Unknown

Quotes about… KNOWLEDGE

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

Sandra Carey

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

Vernon Cooper

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

Brian Tracy

Far better is it to know everything of a little than a little of everything.

Pickering

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

William Ellery Channing

It is not good to know more unless we do more with what we already know.

R. K. Bergethon

It not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.

Anthony Robbins

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.

Norman Juster

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge, arguments an exchange of ignorance.

Robert Quillen

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Samuel Johnson

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Martin H. Fischer

Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch.

Steve Droke

Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse.

Nigerian Proverb

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Daniel Boorstin

The old believe everything; the middle aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Play is the beginning of knowledge.

George Dorsey

Universities are full of Knowledge; the freshman bring a little in, the seniors take none away, and the knowledge there accumulates.

Abbott Lawrence Lowell

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

T. S. Eliot

Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.

Thomas Fuller

Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you: you must acquire it.

Sudie Back

I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can.

Lucille Ball

Knowledge is like money: the more he gets, the more he craves.

Josh Billings

The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance.

Confucius

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Peter F. Drucker

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country!

Benjamin Franklin

You can always draw as well as you know how to. I flatter myself that I feel more than I express on canvas; but I know that is not so.

William Morris Hunt

Knowledge is of two kinds: We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information about it.

Samuel Johnson

It’s a dangerous thing to think we know everything.

Jack Kuehler

The hunger and thirst for knowledge, the keen delight in the chase, the good humored willingness to admit that the scent was false, the eager desire to get on with the work, the cheerful resolution to go back and begin again, the broad good sense, the unaffected modesty, the imperturbable temper, the gratitude for any little help that was given - all these will remain in my memory though I cannot paint them for others.

Frederic William Maitland

There are things known, and there are things unknown. And in between are the doors.

Jim Morrison

Those who think they know it all are very annoying to those of us who do.

Robert K. Mueller

It is nothing for one to know something unless another knows you know it.

Persian Proverb

We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

Rutherford D. Roger

No matter what happens, there’s always somebody who knew it would.

Lonny Starr

The less you know, the more you think you know, because you don’t know you don’t know.

Ray Stevens

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

Tom Stoppard

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Henry David Thoreau

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

Mark Twain

Knowledge becomes wisdom only after it has been put to practical use.

Source Unknown

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

John Archibald Wheeler

Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.

Florence Scovel Shinn

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

People who soar are those who refuse to sit back, sigh and wish things would change. They neither complain of their lot nor passively dream of some distant ship coming in. Rather, they visualize in their minds that they are not quitters; they will not allow life’s circumstances to push them down and hold them under.

Charles Swindoll

Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.

Joel Barker

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

Warren G. Bennis

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Source Unknown

Vision without a task is only a dream. A task without a vision is but drudgery. But vision with a task is a dream fulfilled.

Willie Stone

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

James Ramsey Ullman

Vision looks inward and becomes duty.
Vision looks outward and becomes aspiration.
Vision looks upward and becomes faith.

Stephen S. Wise

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.

Pamela Vaull Starr

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

Casey Kasem

Three people were at work on a construction site. All were doing the same job, but when each was asked what the job was, the answers varied. “Breaking rocks,” the first replied. “Earning my living,” the second said. “Helping to build a cathedral,” said the third.

Peter Schultz

When it is darkest, men see the stars.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Faith is power to believe and power to see…

Prentice Mulford

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare.

Japanese Proverb

We cannot rise higher than our thought of ourselves.

Orison Swett Marden

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Only he who can see the invisible can do the impossible.

Frank Gaines

Live by what you believe so fully that your life blossoms, or else purge the fear-and-guilt producing beliefs from your life. When people believe one thing and do something else, they are inviting misery. If you give yourself the name, play the game. When you believe something you don’t follow with your heart, intellect, and body, it hurts. Don’t do that to yourself. Live your belief, or let that belief go. If you are not actively living a belief, it’s not really your belief, anyway.

John Roger

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.

Anonymous

The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, The work is done.

Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr.

It’s easy to say “no!” when there’s a deeper “yes!” burning inside.

Stephen R. Covey

The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

Joel A. Barker

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle

Albert Einstein

To come to be you must have a vision of Being, a Dream, a Purpose, a Principle. You will become what your vision is.

Peter Nivio Zarlenga

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Jonathan Swift

No vision and you perish; No Ideal, and you’re lost; Your heart must ever cherish Some faith at any cost. Some hope, some dream to cling to, Some rainbow in the sky, Some melody to sing to, Some service that is high.

Harriet Du Autermont

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the wawakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness”, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.

Omar Nelson Bradley

Look at everthing as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

Betty Smith

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

Dag Hammarskjold

You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.

Warren Bennis

What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of work he is doing, is a vision of what his place is and may be. He needs an objective and a purpose. He needs a feeling and a belief that he has some worthwhile thing to do. What this is no one can tell him. It must be his own creation. Its success will be measured by the nature of his vision, what he has done to equip himself, and how well he has performed along the line of its development.

Joseph M. Dodge

Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Albert Einstein

The road winds up the hill to meet the height; Beyond the locust hedge it curves from sight - And yet no man would foolishly contend. That where he sees it not, it makes an end.

Emma Carleton

You don’t need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles - events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.

Harry Browne

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

Will Rogers

It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of percepton is also the limit of all there is to perceive.

C. W. Leadbeater

Aim for the highest.

Andrew Carnegie
Your mind is on vacation, but your mouth is workin’ overtime.

Mose Alison

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Hannah Arendt, quoted in W.H. Auden’s A Certain World

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

The actuality of thought is life.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, book XII, ch. 7

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.

Mary Kay Ash

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Richard Bach

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Francis Bacon

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Henri Louis Bergson

BRAIN, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

No, no, you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.

Niels (Henrik David) Bohr

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

Sir William Bragg

I reject ‘get it done’, ‘make it happen’ thinking. I want to slow things down so I understand them better.

Governor Jerry Brown

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

Buddha Gotama

Speech is too often not . . . the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

Clarence S. Darrow

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

Albert Einstein

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

Henry Ford

You must not allow yourself to dwell for a single moment on any kind of negative thought.

Emmet Fox

You must not under any pretense allow your mind to dwell on any thought that is not positive, constructive, optimistic, kind.

Emmet Fox

One thing above all gives charm to men’s thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.

Anatole France

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

William James, Attr. in Clifton Fadiman, American Treasury

Some people read because they are too lazy to think.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

We become what we think about.

Earl Nightingale

There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.

Thomas Paine

And when you think only about your adversities, you bring more adversity to yourself, and the adversities become dominant.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

A Human Thought is an actual EXISTENCE, and a Force and Power, capable of acting upon and controlling matter as well as mind.

Albert Pike

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.

Plato

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

Bertrand Russell

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

William Shakespeare

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Thought is free.

William Shakespeare

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

Socrates

Time to me this truth has taught, (Tis a treasure worth revealing) More offend from want of thought Than from want of feeling.

Charles Swain

Brood about death and you hasten your demise.

Unknown

If you think about disaster, then you will get it.

Unknown

Police Officer: We believe foul play was involved. Tommy Patel: Surely you don’t think I… Police Officer: I don’t think anything, sir. I’m a police officer.

Unknown, in ‘Splitting Heirs’
I’d like people to think of me as someone who cares about them.

Princess of Wales Diana

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.

Benjamin Haydon

A man’s judgment is best when he can forget himself and any reputation he may have acquired and can concentrate wholly on making the right decisions.

Raymond Spruance

Reputation are made every day and every minute.

Christopher Ruel

It is generally much more shameful to lose a good reputation than never to have acquired it.

Pliny The Elder

We would all like a reputation for generosity and we’d all like to buy it cheap.

Mignon Mclaughlin
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

A. N. Whitehead, Dialogues, 135

As time requireth, a man of marvellous mirth and pastimes, and sometimes of as sad gravity, as who say: a man for all seasons.
Robert Whittington, Referring to Sir Thomas Moore; after Erasmus. Vulgaria, Pt II, ‘De constructione nominum’

Ability Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Francis Bacon

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.

John G. Pollard

Perhaps I’m old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.

Janos Arany

Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him … when the hill stood still, he was never a wit abashed, but said, ‘If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.’

Francis Bacon, Often misquoted as ‘If the mountain will not come to Mohammed’. Essays, ‘Of Boldness’

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.

Francis Bacon, Essays

For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.

Harry F. Banks

In the last analysis, ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.

Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The devil’s most devilish when respectable.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta

The superior man is distressed by his want of ability.

Confucius, Analects

One should oblige everyone to the extent of one’s ability. One often needs someone smaller than oneself.

Jean de la Fontaine, Fables II ‘Le Lion et le Rat’

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am only one, but I am still one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, Pt I, Ch. 4

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.

Diana, Princess of Wales, The Times 22 Aug 1994, replying to allegations that she had been making nuisance telephone calls.

It is a great ability to be able to conceal one’s ability.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

Every man loves what he is good at.

Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow

Everything actual must also first have been possible, before having actual existence.
Unknown

Ability is of little account without opportunity.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains

Ken Carey

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

Mahatma Gandhi

The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Edward Gibbon

The king is the man who can.

Thomas Carlyle

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.

Josh Billings

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Andrew Carnegie

When it is a question of God’s almighty Spirit, never say, “I can’t.”

Oswald Chambers

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Elbert Hubbard

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Elbert Hubbard

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Marcus T. Cicero

Anybody can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

Sam Rayburn

The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.

Thomas A. Edison

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Theodore Roosevelt

Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

Desiderius Erasmus

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

Horace Walpole

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

Douglas Everett

Others have done it before me. I can, too.

Corporal John Faunce

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right!

Henry Ford

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.

James A. Froude

People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don’t understand; no wonder they come to grief.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

John Andrew Holmes

To know how to hide one’s ability is great skill.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Certainly we’re not satisfied with just winning games. We’ve been playing some pretty good hockey, but we think we can play much better.

Mario Lemieux

Analyzing what you haven’t got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.

Grace Moore

Behind every able man, there are always other able men.

Chinese Proverb

When one must, one can.

Yiddish Proverb

Put yourself in a state of mind where you say to yourself, “Here is an opportunity for me to celebrate like never before, my own power, my own ability to get myself to do whatever is necessary.”

Anthony Robbins

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Theodore Roosevelt

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

John Ruskin

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Henry David Thoreau

The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts.

Booker T. Washington

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.

Stevie Wonder

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.

John Wooden

Ability is a poor man’s wealth.

M. Wren
Quotes about… CHANCE

I didn’t ask for it to be over. But then again I didn’t ask for it to begin. For that’s the way it is with life, as some of the most beautiful days come completely by chance. But even the most beautiful days eventually have their sunset.

Javan

Chance can allow you to accomplish a goal every once in a while, but consistent achievement happens only if you love what you are doing.

Bart Conner

Do not always prove yourself to be the one in the right. The right will appear. You need only give it a chance.

C. H. Fowler

Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur

A wise man turns chance into good fortune.

Thomas Fuller

Sometimes I pause and sadly think of all the things that might have been. Of all the golden chances I let slip by, And which never returned again. It fills me with gloom when I ponder this, Till I look on the other side. How I might have been completely engulfed by misfortune’s surging tide.

G.J. Russell

Many a happiness in life, as many a disaster, can be due to chance, but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends.

Jacques Delille

People who come up with “It may not work” or “What are we going to do if it fails?” do not have the credentials to be businessmen. If there is only a 1 percent chance of success, a true businessperson sees that 1 percent as the spark to light a fire.

Kim Woo-Choong

One chance is all you need.

Jesse Owens

How come “fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing?

Ziggy

Quotes about… EXPERIENCE

A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a man made perfect without trials.

Chinese proverb

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment.

Cousin Woodman

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.

Vernon S. Law

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is a comb which nature gives to men when they are bald.

Chinese Proverb

Experience is that marvellous thing that enable you to recognise a mistake when you make it again.

Franklin P. Jones

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Oscar Wilde

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

Francis Bacon

It is all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.

Mick Jagger

Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time.

Greg LeMond

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

Dan Stanford

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

One of the greatest moments in anybody’s developing experience is when he no longer tries to hide from himself but determines to get acquainted with himself as he really is.

Norman Vincent Peale

I know by my own pot how the others boil.

French Proverb

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance. To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

Elie Wiesel

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.

Thich Nhat Hahn

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

George Bernard Shaw

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaningâ€¦and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

Bergen Evens

Experience is often what you get when you were expecting something else.
Source Unknown

Ask the experienced rather than the learned.
Arabic proverb

Experience is something you get too late to do anything about the mistakes you made while getting it.
Source Unknown

If we could sell our experience for what they cost us, we’d all be millionaires.
Abigail Van Buren

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.
Randolph Bourne

Experience is the key to greatness.
Arthur Williams

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Antrim, Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions, 1902

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Ambrose (Gwinnett) Bierce

Experience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Elizabeth E. Bowen, The Death of the Heart, Pt I. Ch. 1

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Albert Camus

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

G. K. Chesterton

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James, Partial Portraits

I am a part of all that I have met; / Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

George Santayana

Trouble brings experience, and experience brings wisdom.
Unknown

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Quotes about… DREAMS

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

Louisa May Alcott

You control your future, your destiny. What you think about comes about. By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands - your own.

Mark Victor Hansen

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

Woodrow Wilson

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

Henry David Thoreau

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

Christopher Reeve

If you can DREAM it, you can DO it.

Walt Disney

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

John Updike

Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

James Dean

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

Les Brown

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens.

Carl Gustav Jung

Commit yourself to a dream . . . Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure. Why? Because he can always rest assured that he succeeded in life’s most important battle - he defeated the fear of trying.

Robert H. Schuller

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Begin it now.

Goethe

The very substance of the ambitions is merely the shadow of a dream.

William Shakespheare

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

Brian Tracy

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.

Napoleon Hill

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

Sir James M. Barrie

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

William Faulkner

Goals are dreams with deadlines.

Diana Scharf Hunt

The size of your accomplishments, the quality of your achievement, will depend very largely on how big a man you see in yourself, what sort of image you set your possible self, yourself at your best.

Orison Swett Marden

A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.

Zadok Rabinowitz

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Oscar Wilde

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

Henry David Thoreau

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

Anais Nin

Commitment unlocks the doors of imagination, allows vision, and gives us the “right stuff” to turn our dreams into reality.

James Womack

Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so.

Belva Davis

Within our dreams and aspirations we find our opportunities.

Sue Ebaugh

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success - the earliest spark in the dreaming youth - if this; dream a great dream.

John A. Applemen

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

James Allen

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

John Barrymore

America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now… we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Yes, you can be a dreamer and a doer too, if you will remove one word from your vocabulary: impossible.

H. Robert Schuller

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Follow your dreams, for as you dream you shall become.

Anonymous

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality.

L.J. Suenens

Before your dreams can come true, you have to have those dreams.

Dr. Joyce Brothers

Help others achieve their dreams and you will achieve yours.

Les Brown

Dreams get you into the future and add excitement to the present.

Robert Conklin

It may be those who do most, dream most.

Stephen Leacock

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

Douglas Everett

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

Robert F. Kennedy

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

The way I see it, there are two kinds of dreams. One is a dream that’s always going to be just that….. A dream. A vision that you can never really hold in your hand. Then there’s a dream that’s more than a dream its like…. A map. A map that you live by and follow for the rest of your days Knowing that someday your going to stand on top of that Mountain holding everything you thought of Right There In Your Hand!

Robert Cooper

If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make a dream come true?

Oscar Hammerstein

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Gloria Steinem

You can often measure a person by the size of his dream.

Robert H. Schuller

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

John Wooden

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Abraham Lincoln

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

James A. Michener

If you don’t run your own life, somebody else will.

John Atkinson

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Helen Keller

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece-by thought, choice, courage and determination.

John Luther

Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgment will always be in demand under all conditions.

Roger Babson

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

H. Jackson Browne

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

Faith Baldwin

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Abraham Lincoln

The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.

John Holt

Let us not say, every man is the architect of his own fortune; but let us say, every man is the architect of his own character.

George D. Boardman

There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he is absolutely free to choose.

William M. Bulger

Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action. If one lets fear or hate or anger take possession of the mind, they become self-forged chains.

Helen Gahagan Douglas

Don’t worry so much about your self-esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.

Laura Schlessinger

The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.

Abigail Van Buren

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

William Ellery Channing

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Mark Twain

John-Roger

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

Aesop

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Marva Collins

People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

There are two types of people - those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are.”

Frederick L. Collins

It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize.

Stephen R. Covey

Therefore keep in the midst of life. Do not isolate yourself. Be among men and things, and among troubles, and difficulties, and obstacles.

Henry Drummond

Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.

Tryon Edwards

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Character is the sum and total of a person’s choices.

P. B. Fitzwater

Character is not made in a crisis - it is only exhibited.

Robert Freeman

Success is always temporary. When all is said and one, the only thing you’ll have left is your character.

Vince Gill

When God measures man, He puts the tape around his heart - not his head.

Guideposts

It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog, that counts.

Harry Howell

To succeed is nothing - it’s an accident. But to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.

Marie Leneru

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

Plato

Clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.

Chinese Proverb

Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give. When to this truth you awaken, then you begin to live.

Bayard Taylor

Character is a victory, not a gift.
Source Unknown

Quotes about… GENIUS

Genius … is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.
Edward Robert Bulwer

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
Simone de Beauvoir

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James

It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
Louisa May Alcott

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
C. W. Ceran

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

What is genius, anyway, if it isn’t the ability to give an adequate response to a great challenge?
Bette Greene

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.
Heinrich Heine

Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.

George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Arthur Koestler

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

Benjamin Franklin

True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.

Puzant Kevork Thomajan

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.

H. R. Trevor-Roper
I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.

David Livingstone

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

Orville Wright

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.

Frederick Douglass

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Anonymous

One problem with gazing too frequently into the past is that we may turn around to find the future has run out on us.

Michael Cibenko

Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!

Og Mandino

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All movement is not progress, just as all motion is not forward.

Anonymous

I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.

Abraham Lincoln

Progress is a tide. If we stand still we will surely be drowned. To stay on the crest, we have to keep moving.

Harold Mayfield

It is not strange … to mistake change for progress.

Millard Fillmore

Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance.

Alexander Pope

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

George Bernard Shaw

Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your feet on first.

Frederick Wilcox

If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.

Calvin Coolidge

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.

St. Francis de Sales

The past is a guide post, not a hitching post.

L. Thomas Holdcroft

Restlessness is discontent - and discontent is the first necessities of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

Thomas A. Edison

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart.

John Jay Chapman

You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.

Charles F. Kettering

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Adlai E. Stevenson

We trained hard - but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralizaton.

Gaius Petronius Arbiter

Once a new technology rolls over you, if your’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

Stewart Brand

Quotes about… ASK

You don’t always get what you ask for, but you never get what you don’t ask for… unless it’s contagious!
Franklyn Broude

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
Bernard M. Baruch

My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.
Peter F. Drucker

Great things are only possible with outrageous requests.
Thea Alexander

You can’t ask for what you want unless you know what it is. A lot of people don’t know what they want or they want much less than they deserve. First you have figure out what you want. Second, you have to decide that you deserve it. Third, you have to believe you can get it. And, fourth, you have to have the guts to ask for it.
Barbara De Angelis

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.
Jim Rohn

If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!
W. Clement Stone

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek; and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. [Matthew 7:7-8]
Bible

Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers.
Robert Half

You create your opportunities by asking for them.
Patty Hansen

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
Robert F. Kennedy

Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.
Chinese Proverb

Better to ask twice than to lose your way once.
Danish Proverb

You’ve got to ask! Asking is, in my opinion, the world’s most powerful - and neglected - secret to success and happiness.
Percy Ross

Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.
Source Unknown

Quotes about… QUALITY

Men are more important than tools. If you don’t believe so, put a good tool into the hands of a poor workman.

John J. Bernet

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well.

Steve Brown

If you forget you have to struggle for improvement you go backward.

Geoffrey Hickson

If you want work well done, select a busy man; the other kind has no time.

Elbert Hubbard

Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.

Wyatt Earp

Not too long ago, if you did 75 percent of the things you did right, it was okay. Now, if you don’t do 98 percent of those things right, some competitor will eat you for lunch.

John Spoelhof

Everything can be improved.

C. W. Barron

Quality begins on the inside… and then works its way out.

Bob Moawad

It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.

Martin Van Buren

Could everything be done twice it would be done better.

Proverb

Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.

Finagle

It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity.

Mahatma Gandhi

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.

William A. Foster

Quotes about… OPTIMISM

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Reginald B. Mansell

Positive thinking is the key to success in business, education, pro football, anything that you can mention. I go out there thinking that I’m going to complete every pass.

Ron Jaworski

I became an optimist when I discovered that I wasn’t going to win any more games by being anything else.

Earl Weaver

I am optimistic and confident in all that I do. I affirm only the best for myself and others. I am the creator of my life and my world. I meet daily challenges gracefully and with complete confidence. I fill my mind with positive, nurturing, and healing thoughts.

Alice Potter

Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something special in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only of the best, work only for the best, and expect only the best. Be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.

Christian D. Larsen

Optimism. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

Ambrose Bierce

My sun sets to rise again.

Robert Browning

When you have seven percent unemployed, you have ninety-three percent working.

John F. Kennedy

Quotes about… LUCK

Winners believe that they create their own luck by their actions; losers believe in good and bad luck.
Source Unknown ***

I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.

Brian Tracy

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. ***
Ray Kroc

I believe in luck. The harder I work the luckier I get.
Sam Shoen

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Jean Cocteau

All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck - who keeps right on going - is the man who is there when the good luck comes - and is ready to receive it.

Robert Collier

When I work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, I get lucky.

Dr. Armand Hammer

Success is just a matter of luck, all you need to do is ask a failure. History may be written by academics but it’s rarely created by them.

Source Unknown

Quotes about… FAULTS

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.
Confucius

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.
Chinese Proverb

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle

People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people’s minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.
Elizabeth Gaskell

It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.
William Hazlitt

Fools can find fault, but they can’t act anymore wisely.
Langbien

Our faults irritate us most when we see them in others.
Pennsylvania Dutch Proverb

Faults are beauties in a lovers eye.
Theocritus

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies it is the first law of nature.
Voltaire

We forget our faults easily when they are known to ourselves alone.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Quotes about… INTELLIGENCE

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
Albert Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Albert Einstein

Knowledge is the antidote to fear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.

Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters

A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso.

A. P. Herbert, The Highbrow

An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

Elbert Green Hubbard, The Note Book

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Carl Sagan

The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can`t read them.

Mark Twain

Common sense is what tells us that the Earth is flat.
Unknown

Police Officer: We believe foul play was involved.
Tommy Patel: Surely you don’t think I…
Police Officer: I don’t think anything, sir. I’m a police officer.

Unknown, in ‘Splitting Heirs’

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

A. N. Whitehead, Dialogues, 135

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Groucho Marx

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Sir James Dewar

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
Mark Twain

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Samuel Butler

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.
W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.
W. Edwards Deming

All my life I’ve wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain

We think in generalities, but we live in details.
Alfred North Whitehead

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Mark Twain

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
Christopher Darlington Morley

The man who never makes a mistake always takes orders from one who does.

No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
Daisy Bates

Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.
James R. Cook

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer

When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.
Walter Lippmann

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
Mark Twain

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
Voltaire

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you’re not really interested in order to get where you’re going.
Christopher Darlington Morley

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
Kathleen Norris

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I’m right.
Ashleigh Brilliant

The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.
Harold Coffin

Too bad all the people who know how to run this country are busy running taxicabs or cutting hair.
George Burns

iamhere

The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him.
Stanislaw Jerszy Lec

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
Olin Miller

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Mark Twain

We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie

A memorandum isn’t written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer.
Dean Acheson

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.
Groucho Marx

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven’t
what they want that they don’t want it.

A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read.
Mark Twain

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain

A jury consists of twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.
T. H. White

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us
wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Of those who say nothing, few are silent.
Thomas Neill

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Plato

The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.
Voltaire

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

I can’t understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I’m frightened of old ones.
John Cage

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Jules de Gaultier

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead

The important thing is never to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
Woodrow Wilson

About leadershipÂ No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
W. A. Nance

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
Ludwig BÃ¶rne

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler

You must believe in free will; there is no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Winston Churchill

I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.
Thomas Edison

Useless laws weaken necessary laws.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

The nice thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
C. Northcote Parkinson

Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
Elias Root Beadle

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

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we’ve been bombing over the years been complaining?
George Wallace

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
H. Jackson Brown

One person with courage is majority.

Greate minds discuss Ideas, Mediocre minds discuss events and weak minds discuss people.

World stands aside and give way to the person who knows where he is going.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
- Frank Tibolt

The smallest of actions is always better than the boldest of intentions.

Without deep concentration, your mind will be your master rather than being your servant

We first make our habits, then our habits makes us.

He who asks may be a fool for five minutes, the one who doesnâ€™t is a fool for life time.

Diligence is the mother of good luck.
Benjamin franklin.

All the truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
Thomas Henry Huxley

People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.”
-Â Â Â Lee Iacocca

“A person should not be too honest.
Straight trees are cut first and Honest people are screwed first.”

Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC 75 BC)

“Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.”

Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC)

“The biggest guru-mantra is: Never share your secrets with anybody. ! It will destroy you.”

Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC)

“There is some self-interest behind every friendship.
There is no Friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.”

Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC)

“Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply
and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.”

Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC)

“As soon as the fear approaches near, attack and destroy it.”
Chanakya quotes (Indian politician, strategist and writer, 350 BC-275 BC)

“Once you start a working on something,
don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it.
People who work sincerely are the happiest.”