If you want to succeed, be like a duck above the surface act serene and calm, but below the surface, paddle like crazy.
Treat your wastebaskets like babies keep them within reach at all times, feed them frequently, and change them often.
Sometimes our institutions (the schools) are like sand dunes in the desert-shaped more by influences than purposes.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words; your words become your actions; your actions become your habits; your habits become your character; your character becomes your destiny.
It takes a friend and an enemy, working in concert, to hurt you to the core the enemy to slander you and the friend to tell you about it.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – for I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out – for I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out.
In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.
I don’t think that by studying science you will be forced to conclude that there must be a God. But if you have already found God, then you can say, from understanding science, ‘Ah, I see what God has done in the world’.’
We human beings have a tendency to make absolute judgments, to judge what happens in terms of black and white. But life is far more complex as the Gospel says, �wheat and chaff go together.�
The most tragic legacy that slavery bequeathed to America is one the country has yet to overcome The two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are also unable to separate entirely or combine.
The most tragic legacy that slavery bequeathed to America is one the country has yet to overcome The two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are also unable to separate entirely or combine.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come. (Carl Sandburg, U.S. poet and biographer 1878-1967
Native talent is the most evenly distributed resource in the world. It is a resource that can be tapped wherever it is.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. (
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or un-indebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Freedom is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don�t die, they became fearful of women�s power.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don�t die, they became fearful of women�s power.
I always turn to the sports page first which records people�s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but people�s failures.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
We all have two choices we can make a living OR we can design a life.
Don’t let the sun set without taking a bite out of the road toward your goal.
There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.
I love the male body; it’s better designed than the male mind.
We live in a world of continuous partial attention.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
�There isn�t a single square inch of the world that hasn�t been stolen.� In other words, there is no place in the world that has not been stolen or taken from someone else. Countries talk about hereditary borders, but such talk is nonsense There�s always been someone else there before.
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists.
I didn’t marry you with the thought of spending lunch times together – just breakfast and dinners.
Life is not a jouirney to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to ski in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a Ride!”
In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; but the realist adjusts the sails.
Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.
Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.
I fear the use of fear and security as the Damocles over the nation’s people.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Sometimes I think war is God’s way of teaching us geography.
If the U.S. entered the war [WWI] to make the world safe for democracy, she needed first to make democracy safe in America.
There is no one “history.” Rather, there are just historical perspectives by individuals and/or groups that help piece together chains of events that help explain the past.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
The role of religion should be to inculcate a sense not of infallibility but of humility.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Love is a battle in which two free subjects each try to get hold of the other’s freedom while at the same time trying to free themselves from the hold of the other.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he [sic] stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
How can a solution come if everyone is trying to gain more and more? Nobody yet has said, �What can I give for a solution, what can I sacrifice to achieve peace?�
There is no shame in accepting the mistakes of one�s country; the shame is in concealing the mistakes and letting the next generation quietly inherit horrors they had no part in.
There is no shame in accepting the mistakes of one�s country; the shame lies in concealing the mistakes and letting the next generation quietly inherit horrors they had no part in.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Contemporary audiences tend to go towards books and plays which deal with actual events, believing that what happens in life is “real” and what an artist creates is not. In doing so, they fail to recognize how much more valuable than the real thing the unreal thing can be if it tells us the truth about that thing.
No matter how exalted we think ourselves, how high we have risen, we nevertheless bear the indelible stamp of our lowly origin . . . from so simple a beginning-endless forms, most beautiful, most wonderful, have been or are being evolved.
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
I dreamed of a thousand paths. I awoke to find mine and to follow it.
Those who wander are not necessarily lost.
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they�ve been in.
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.
Don’t go down to the cellar until the windstorm hits.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.
Every tooth in one’s head is attached to an acupuncture meridian that goes to a different organ in one’s body.
If people empty their purse into their heads, no one can take it away from them, for an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of the missing drop.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
If we are to reach real peace in this world . . . we shall have to begin with the children.
Don’t ever believe that where you are now is the only possibility!
Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own; it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, by stamping on it. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the �truth.�
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
When you’re through changing, learning, working to stay involved – only then are you through.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
We all have both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.
The value of education is not as much the amount of knowledge as it is the ability to question knowledge – �better a well molded than a filled mind.�
As Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy, and it’s us.”
America – the nation of the bullet as well as the ballot, and unlikely to change.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep. (Henry Maudsley, pioneering British psychiatrist 1835-1918
So much in the world has been destroyed that I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Start where you are, but don’t stay there.
It�s not the load that breaks you down; it�s the way you carry it.
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
It’s not the YEARS, it’s the MILEAGE!
Each and every one of us is a unique musical instrument that echoes her/his distinctive melody. Together we construct the world’s orchestra that makes the universe work.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
When a whole nation is roaring �Patriotism� at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of heart.
There is no shame in accepting one�s mistakes; the shame is in concealing one�s mistakes and letting the next generation quietly inherit horrors they had no part in.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
If you want to succeed, be like a duck above the surface act serene and calm, but below the surface, paddle like crazy.
I may not be able to change the world I see around me, but I can change the way I see the world within me.
As soon as I place the blame for my failure upon someone else, I limit my opportunities for growth.
Sometimes our institutions [the schools] are like sand dunes in the desert-shaped more by influences than purposes.
Follow your bliss. Don’t be afraid and doors will open where you would not have thought there were going to be doors.
I am pleased to see that we are different. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty not knowing what comes next.
Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words; your words become your actions; your actions become your habits; your habits become your character; your character becomes your destiny.
It takes a friend and an enemy, working in concert, to hurt you to the core the enemy to slander you and the friend to tell you about it.
There are more than 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy. There are 100 million such galaxies in the universe. There are many universes.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – for I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out – for I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out.
In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprisefor the poor and socialism for the rich.
I don’t think that by studying science you will be forced to conclude that there must be a God. But if you have already found God, then you can say, from understanding science, ‘Ah, I see what God has done in the world’.’
You can only move forward until you get out of reverse, such as through the Truth and Reconciliation process.
We human beings have a tendency to make absolute judgments, to judge what happens in terms of black and white. But life is far more complex: as the Gospel says, �wheat and chaff go together.�
Shown oppression, Africans oppress. A continent so long and brutally violated behaves, no surprise, like a person abused. So . . . Africa rages and inflicts pain—chiefly on itself. This perpetual culling and demeaning of people affects the spirit. Imperialism divided the continent by boundaries that reflect neither natural geography nor ethnicity. Colonialism favored some African peoples over others, inflaming and institutionalizing ethnic rivalries as a matter of policy. The Cold War armed and sustained the cruelest of despots.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
When you experience mercy . . . you begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
The most dangerous political force In America today is a long memory � and memory will not die in the Special Collections room of a good library.
The most dangerous political force In the U.S. today is a long memory � and memory will not die in the Special Collections room of a good library.
War should be to effect a humanitarian result — not just to kill people and collect real estate.
The finest diamonds occur under the hottest heat.
We must draw the critical connections between lives lost to intentional violent acts and lives lost to structural injustices — impoverishment and inequality — around the world.
Parties on either side who follow the rule of an �eye for an eye� soon find themselves totally blind.
A form of governance in which resistance is “feudal.”
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or un-indebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or un-indebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.
Freedom is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don’t die, they became fearful of women’s power.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don’t die, they became fearful of women’s power.
For every prohibition you create you also create an underground.
I always turn to the sports page first which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but people’s failures.
Some heroes are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Caesar had the right idea about political control. Give the people bread and circuses [diversion] , and they will go along with it. Almost two thousand years later, the idea still seems to hold true.
The proper role of the news reporter is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast you.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
We all have two choices. We can make a living OR we can design a life.
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world. Only learning what one does not know can rescue one from the lost world in which everyone claims to have THE answer.
No to war! War is not always inevitable – it is always a defeat for humanity.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomatic skill.
Study the past if you divine the future.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
There is nothing noble in being superior to some other people. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.
Education and information without the guiding principles of love and justice lead to the development of guided missiles and misguided men and women.
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
We live in a world of continuous partial attention.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
We must never confuse dissent with disloyalty.
Pick a piece of the problem that you can help solve while trying to see how your piece fits into the broader social change puzzle.
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists.
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be.
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; but the realist adjusts the sails.
Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.
Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.
We can learn much from wise words, little from wisecracks, and less from wise guys.
A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.
Happiness is an inside job.
If even one percent of our defense budget were given to diplomacy, it would quadruple the amount we are currently spending on diplomacy.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
To engage in serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of people of color, but with the flaws of American society-flaws rested in historic inequalities and stereotypes.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything related to politics. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
I am not a teacher but an awakener.
Compassion opens the inner door of the heart.
Trained to kill, Kill we will.
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, withouit which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
The quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand-in-hand.
The U.S. passed from barbarism to decadence, without having passed through civilization.
Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.
Those who prefer security over civil rights deserve neither security nor civil rights.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
One of the best reasons to learn something is to give it away.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
If the U.S. entered the war [WWI] to make the world safe for democracy, she needed first to make democracy safe in America.
There is no one history. Rather, there are just historical perspectives by individuals and/or groups that help piece together chains of events that help explain the past.
Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Being literate is the only way to be free.
We are more alike, my friend, than we are unalike.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.
The most useful piece of learning . . . is to unlearn what is untrue.
Social norms are not taught; they are overheard, but the on thing even the most skilled deaf people cannot do is overhear.
The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are equally unique manifestations of the human spirit.
If you stand on the shoulders of others, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life so that others may stand on your shoulders.
Government run by organized money is more fearful than government run by organized mobs.
The role of religion should be to inculcate a sense not of infallibility but of humility.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he [sic] stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.
If you bury the truth, a thousand lies will sprout from the soil.
No one can save the one who closes his ears to the truth.
The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.
How can a solution come if everyone is trying to gain more and more? Nobody yet has said, What can I give for a solution, what can I sacrifice to achieve peace?
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
The first 25 years of your life, you learn; the next 25 years, you accumulate; the next 25 years, you try to get rid of everything.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Equaity delayed is justice denied.
Contemporary audiences tend to go towards books and plays which deal with actual events, believing that what happens in life is real and what an artist creates is not. In doing so, they fail to recognize how much more valuable than the real thing the unreal thing can be if it tells us the truth about that thing.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
There [is] a myth, a pervasive myth, to the effect that if we . . . only learn to speak English well-and particularly without an accent-we would be welcomed into the American fellowship. [However,] the true test is not our speech. That accent is heard in our pigmentation, our physiognomy, our names.
Diversity is desirable only in principle, not in practice. Long live diversity . . . as long as it conforms to my standards, my mindset, my view of life, my sense of order.
I slept and dreamed that life was happiness. I awoke and saw that life was service. I served and found that in service, happiness is found.
No matter how exalted we think ourselves, how high we have risen, we nevertheless bear the indelible stamp of our lowly origin . . . from so simple a beginning-endless forms, most beautiful, most wonderful, have been or are being evolved.
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember; Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the pathway of the strong.
Those who have a why or what to live for can bear almost any how.
Just as war begins in the minds of men, so does peace.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
An education that teaches us to understand something about the world has done only half of the assignment. The other half is for us to learn to do something about making the world a better place.
A person is a person through other persons.
How do I know what I think until I see what I write?
Do you know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
You can get busy living, or get busy dying.
I tend to think that those who leave us will live even stronger in our lives as the years go by.
The greatest gift of youth is to be unaware that life is fragile.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social upliftis is approaching spiritual doom.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance of the need to change.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
The most flexible mode of expression is dialogue.
I dreamed of a thousand paths. I awoke to find mine and to follow it.
Those who wander are not necessarily lost.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
We have no money, so we will have to think.
Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.
What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will.
What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will.
Silence is complicity.
Words are loaded pistols.
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.
He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.
Leaders need to know who they are-including how others see them.
You should make the most of this time and place in your life, for never again will you inhabit an environment so challenging and yet so nurturing, so rigorous and yet so forgiving.
There are no extraordinary people, only ordinary people with extraordinary challenges to take on.
The process of a living language is like the motion of a broad river which flows with a slow, silent, irresistible current.
The study of word origins points to our common humanity.
If people empty their purse into their heads, no one can take it away from them, for an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of the missing drop.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
If we are to reach real peace in this world . . . we shall have to begin with the children.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own; it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, by stamping on it. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.
We always use evil to prevent greater evil. How much evil must be done to achieve good?
The manuscript of nature is the true scripture.
The seeds of poverty are with institutions, not individuals.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.
We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on.
The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the efficiency of transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.
Go to where the silence is and say something.
America-the nation of the bullet as well as the ballot, and unlikely to change.
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep. (Henry Maudsley, pioneering British psychiatrist
What we have done for OURSELVES alone, dies with us; what we have done for OTHERS and the WORLD remains and is immortal.
Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Luck is what happens when it meets preparation.
If your vision is for one year, plant rice; if your vision is for 10 years, plant trees; but if your vision is for 100 years, educate youth.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable.
So much in the world has been destroyed that I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Each living creature [is[ a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.
Whenever we exploit the earth, we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich; it is a way to be rich.
The benchmark of greatness is finding joy in loving and serving others.
It is a sad world that exists only in the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here.
Advertising is legalized lying.
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Old age is when we begin extolling the past at the expense of the present.
An individual human existence should be like a river. Small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
Experience is not what happens to people; it is what they do with what happens to them.
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so we weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
History is often overly informed by memory rather than by assessing the facts, telling the story, and rendering a judgment.
When nothing seems to help, I think of a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together.
Every man possesses three characters. That which he exhibits, that which he really has, and that which he believes he has.
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.
There are two ways of spreading light. To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only a page.
It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.
The important thing is not somuch that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
The excesses of our youth are drafts of our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date.
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.
Capitalism desacralizes nature and makes it a commodity for exploitation and profit.
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment – and nothing more corrupting.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.
Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you will see.
Life is a long lesson in humility.
The desire of knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
While some dolphins are reported to have learned English — up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
People will believe a big lie sooner than they will a little lie, and if you repeat it often enough, people will, sooner or later, believe it.
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
A cult is a religion with no political power.
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. Similarly, there are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living.
The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
It is not just what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. (Mark Twain, author and humorist
God created sex; priests created marriage.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the world.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
War is the enemy of the poor.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
If architects want to strengthen an old arch, they put more weight on it.
The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
For sleep, riches and health to be truly enjoyed, they must be interrupted.
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.
Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience.
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
Misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness.
I will believe that corporations are real people when Texas decides not to execute them.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you . . . and you win.
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
A bad reader is like a bad translator. He interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Language is the armory of the human mind; at once it contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
I have studied [the dictionary] often, but I never could discover the plot.
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened but of what people believe happened.
War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.
If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.
Political action is best when it accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
If you want something talked about, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
Great progress flows from once laughable ideas – such as moon colonization.
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness.
Honor grows from qualms.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his brain [head]. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed.
Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
Political equality is meaningless in the face of economic inequality.
[We have] socialism for the rich and rugged free-market capitalism for the poor.
The evils of free-market capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
A man without a vote is a man without protection.
Never cut what you can untie.
When you feel less than, you spend more than.
In taming our inner dragons, the energy of old and, often, unconscious habits and personal complexes may too frequently overpower our fragile intentions.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Language is a city to which every human being brought a stone for the building of it.
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural – while it was recent.
The forests are my lungs outside the body.
If only I may grow firmer, simpler — quieter, warmer.
Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run.
Read one thousand books AND walk one thousand miles.
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that, said the Queen.
Religious canons all too often lead to cannons!
It takes a long time to become young.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
The Negro knows nothing of Africa [said to have been expressed with pain and distress].
There is nothing…to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
Walking is also an ambulation of mind.
Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.
Life is a foreign language; most men mispronounce it.
If only closed minds came with closed mouths!
Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
The welfare of each of us is dependent upon the welfare of all of us.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Some words in a dictionary are very much like a car in a large motor show — full of potential, but temporarily inactive.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question.
We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Creativity is the residue of wasted time.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
By words the mind is winged.
He who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, explore the glen, stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
Language is anonymous, collective, and unconscious, the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language.
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
People change and forget to tell each other.
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, I speak as a citizen of the world without others saying, God, what a nut.
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain. Either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
When plunder [corruption] becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves . . . a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis.
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.
Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.
Personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
Principles should be guideposts, not roadblocks.
If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is the artistry of democracy.
If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is the artistry of democracy. (Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thomason
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
Live below your means but within your needs.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity.
In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
The ring always believes that the finger lives for it.
As long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
As long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
Until one has loved an animal, part of their soul remains unawakened.
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.
What is to give light must endure burning.
No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
The privatization of the prisons is not private, not free, and hardly enterprise. It is the further subsidization of corporations at the expense of taxpayers.
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
When you open a school, you close a jail.
The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.
If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. [The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.]
Character [develops] in the full current of human life.
Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable.
On your deathbed, you regret what you didn’t do rather than what you did do.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
Poetry came before reading and writing.
It is through travel that we catch a glimpse of the unity, the continuous and the discrete, the forest and the trees -the pieces of the mosaic that give us the sum of life.
Intuition ad creativity are informed by practice and diligence.
In reflecting on your past, don’t obscure the future.
Reading print is one form of literacy, but there are many types of literacy. Some indigenous groups
A free society is a place where it’s safe to be unpopular. (Adlai Stevenson, U.S. governor, ambassador, 1900-1965Perception: Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. (Laura Ingalls Wilder, U.S. novelist, 1867-1957Royalty: The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. (H.L. Mencken, U.S. writer, editor, and critic, 1880-1956Evolution: Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
A word in earnest is as good as a speech. (Charles Dickens, U.S. novelist, 1812-1870Protest: Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones. (Jose Marti, Cuban revolutionary and poet, 1853-1895Abuse: I and the public know. / What all schoolchildren learn. / Those to whom evil is done. / Do evil in return. (W.H. Auden, English-American poet, 1907-1973Self-Identity: Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity. (Ralph Nader, U.S. activist, author, speaker, and attorney, Born 1934Charity: A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity. (Ralph Nader, U.S. activist, author, speaker, and attorney, Born 1934Incarceration: The U.S. incarcerates more people than China – an authoritarian state – with 4 times the U.S. population.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Language is an anonymous, collective, and unconscious art – the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. (Edward Sapir, U.S. anthropologist, linguist, 1884-1939Action: Better to light a candle than to sit and curse the dark.
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from that of their social environment. (Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate who developed the Theory of Relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics, 1879-1955Opinion: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law. (Ferdinand de Saussure, linguist, 1857-1913Maturity: You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. (Spanish proverbMaturity: The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. (Jean-Paul Sartre, French writer and philosopher, 1905-1980Insight: The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. (Jean-Paul Sartre, French writer and philosopher, 1905-1980Aging: You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
What is history but a fable that is agreed upon? (Napoleon Bonaparte, French military and political leader, 1769-1821Pedestal: A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space. (Gloria Steinem, U.S. feminist, social and political activist, Born 1934Offensiveness: Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it. (Rene Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician, 1596-1650Self-actualization: if one is to be ultimately at peace with himself . . . what he can be, he must be.
Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth. (Archimedes, Greek inventor, physicist, and engineer, c. 287-212 BCEOpportunity: Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth. (Archimedes, Greek inventor, physicist, and engineer, c. 287-212 BCEExtremism: Perfect can be the enemy of good.
If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages. (Isak Dinesen – pen name of Karen Blixen – Danish author, 1885-1962Entitlement: Many people consider the things government does for them to be Social Progress, but theregard the things government does for others as Socialism. (Earl Warren, U.S. Chief Justice and governor of California, 1891-1974Socialism: Many people consider the things government does for them to be Social Progress, but theregard the things government does for others as Socialism.
Words are loaded pistols. (Jean-Paul Sartre, French writer and philosopher, 1905-1980Fun: I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun. (Katharine Hepburn, U.S. actress, 1907-2003Language: Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. (Bill Bryson, U.S. author, Born 1951Exceptionalism: The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. (Lawrence M. Krauss, U.S. theoretical physicist, Born 1954Ignorance: Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. (Susan B. Anthony, U.S. reformer and suffragist, 1820-1906Death: As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die. (Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet, playwright, and painter, 1898-1936Illusions: The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. (Aleksandr Pushkin, Russian poet, novelist, and playwright, 1799-1837Memories: Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Words are the small change of thought. (Jules Renard, French writer, 1864-1910Books: A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. (Salman Rushdie, writer, Born 1947Justice: Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? (Lillian Hellman, U.S. playwright and screenwriter who was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947-52, 1905-1984Happiness: The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side. (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, U.S. writer and aviator, 1906-2001Corporations: The power of all corporations ought to be limited . . . . The growing wealth accumulated by them never fails to be a source of abuses.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. (George Orwell, English writer, 1903-1950Disabilities: The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. (Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice and chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, 1892-1954Liberty: We can afford no liberties with liberty itself. (Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice and chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, 1892-1954Language: No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language. (James Russell Lowell, U.S. poet, editor, and diplomat, 1819-1891Trees: Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone. (Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and novelist, 1911-2004Vision: Where there’s no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18, King James Version of the BibleSustainability: I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management. (E.B. White, U.S. writer, 1899-1985Language: A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy. (Max Weinreich, Yiddish linguist and author, 1894-1969Power: The power to define the situation is the ultimate power.
The power to define the situation is the ultimate power. (Jerry Rubin, U.S. activist and author, 1938-1994Freedom: In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
People hate as they love, unreasonably. (William Makepeace Thackeray, English novelist, 1811-1863Freedom: The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others. (Carlo Dossi, Italian author and diplomat, 1849-1910Political Power: It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. (Robert A. Heinlein, U.S. science-fiction author, 1907-1988People: 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. (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Swiss-American psychiatrist and author, 1926-2004Theories: A good example is worth a thousand theories.
If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. (Edward Hopper, U.S. realist painter, 1882-1967Ambition: If you’re looking too far down the road, you’re not seeing what’s right in front of you.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. (J.K. Rowling, British author, Born 1965Friendship: It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. (J.K. Rowling, British author, Born 1965Profiling: When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. (Guy de Maupassant, French short story writer and novelist, 1850-1893Belief: No amount of belief makes something a fact. (James Randi, Canadian American magician and skeptic, Born 1928Connectedness: Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star. (Paul Dirac, English theoretical physicist, 1902-1984Nature: Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star. (Paul Dirac, English theoretical physicist, 1902-1984Rights: The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself. (Robert Green Ingersoll, U.S. lawyer and orator, 1833-1899Life: The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy. (John Galsworthy, English author, Nobel Prize winner, 1867-1933Conscience: There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all. (Ogden Nash, U.S. poet, 1902-1971Pain: People who are hurting hurt others.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. (John Locke, English philosopher, 1632-1704Banks: I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant reinvigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile. (Elizabeth Drew, U.S. political journalist and author, 1887-1965Consumerism: In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world. (Claude Pepper, U.S. senator and representative, 1900-1989Arrogance: The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. (Stephen Jay Gould, U.S. paleontologist, biologist, author, 1941-2002Journalists: You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty. (Jessica Mitford, English journalist and civil rights activist, 1917-1996Fishing: Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not. (Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, French author of memoirs and aphorisms, 1613-1680Patriotism: The man who is always waving the flag usually waives what it stands for. (Laurence J. Peter, Canadian educator and author, as well as the creator of the Peter Principle, 1919-1990Kindness: Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. (Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer, 1709-1784Art: Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
Everyone is broken by life, but afterward many are strong in the broken places. (Ernest Hemingway,U.S. author and journalist, 1899-1961Equality: The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value. (Arthur Miller, US. playwright and essayist, 1915-2005Progress: Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent. (Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel prize recipient in literature, 1872-1970Behavior: Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. politician who was elected four times as the 32nd US President, 1882-1945Judgment: I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. (Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese poet and artist, 1883-1931Silence – Protest: To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. (Ella Wheeler, U.S. Wilcox, poet, 1850-1919Cowardice: To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. (Abraham Lincoln, U.S. politician who served as the 16th U.S. President, 1809-1865Justice: I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. (Abraham Lincoln, U.S. politician who served as the 16th US President, 1809-1865Discipline: Freedom is on the other side of discipline.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. (Albert Camus, French Nobel prize-winning writer and philosopher, 1913-1960Generosity: Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. (Albert Camus, French Nobel prize-winning writer and philosopher, 1913-1960Friendship: A friend is someone who sees right through and likes the show.
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best. (Henry van Dyke, U.S. poet and educator, 1852-1933Brothers: A brother is a friend given by nature. (Gabriel Legouve, French writer, 1807-1903Patience: Patience is also a form of action.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep 
grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. (Anton Chekhov, Russian physician, short-story writer, and dramatist, 1860-1904Knowledge: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
The strength of a language does not lie in rejecting what is foreign but in assimilating it. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher, 1749-1832Flags: Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. (Arundhati Roy, Indian writer and activist, Born 1961U.S.A.: Our government has become a clearinghouse for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. (Desmond Tutu, South African clergyman, Born 1931Injustice: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. (Desmond Tutu, South African clergyman, Born 1931Peace: Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. (Joseph Conrad, Polish novelist, 1857-1924Conscience: Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it. (Samuel Butler, English writer, 1835-1902Literacy: We learn to read, so we can read to learn.
Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. (John Milton, English poet, 1608-1674Luck: The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck. (Hector Berlioz, French composer, 1803-1869Talent: The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck. (Hector Berlioz, French composer, 1803-1869Equality: The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it’s private property.
Insinceriyy: The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others. (Carlo Dossi, Italian author and diplomat, 1849-1910Prayer -Religion: If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right. (Isaac Asimov, U.S. professor of biochemistry and science-fiction writer, 1920-1992Life: Life is to be lived forward, but understood backward.
If people are generous, empathic, and charitable, does it matter whether theybelieve in a messiah or a prophet?
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable. (Moliere, French playwright and actor, 1622-1673Service: I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you won’t see the shadows.
When we show respect for other living things, they show respect for us.
Education is the vaccination for prevention of poverty.
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
You never feel so alive as when you are close to death.
Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.
Every time I hear that dirty word ‘exercise’ I wash my mouth out with chocolate.
There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.
To know another language is to have a second soul.
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
Imagine that if trees gave Wi-Fi, we would all be planting trees like crazy and would end deforestation. It’s a pity that they only produce the oxygen that we breathe to live.
What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will.
When two languages bump into each other, they borrow stuff. We call it borrowing, except words don’t need to be returned. Sharing is what makes the world go round.
Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.
If it bleeds, it leads [in coverage].
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves.
I can generally bear separation, but I don’t like the leave-taking.
Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Never lend books – nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
No one can build you a bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.
I would rather die standing in resistance than begging on my knees!
Age is simply the number of years the world has had to enjoy you!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
I stopped explaining myself when I realized people only understand from their level of perception.
The most expensive thing in the world is trust, which takes years to earn and only a matter of seconds to lose.
Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones.
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Participation in the arts makes the soul grow. That’s how you grow a soul.
To engage with a work of art is to engage in empathy, to enter the experience of another, to connect with their humanity.
[The arts] speak to what we share, what we hold in common, rather than what pries us apart.
The president proposes and Congress disposes.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears – by listening to them.
An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult.
Children have more need of models than of critics.
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.
Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.
The wildest colts make the best horses.
We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us.
My humanity is tied to your humanity.
If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A man’s opinion is no better than his information.
You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.
The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass but learning to dance in the rain.
I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.
I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
LISTEN and SILENT are spelled with the same letters. Think about it.
History is a novel whose author is the people.
Climb mountains so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic – in WORK, the closest thing to a genuine panacea — known to medical science is work.
We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make anyone say anything at any point in time.
Ethics in technology is essential in the decades to come.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.
I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
There never was night that had no morn.
The onset of agriculture and the emergence of village life was civilization, itself
Civilization represents a repeating, intertwining cycle of chaos, violence, and order. The old dies so that new can be born. Wars drive technological progress and tighten the bonds that hold us together. Little wonder it’s so hard to kick the habit.
I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.
Do not let negative and toxic people rent space in your head. Raise the rent and kick them out.
Life gives everyone a second chance; it’s called tomorrow.
The habits we form from childhood make no small difference. They make all the difference.
No two persons ever read the same book.
Our backs tell stories our books have no spine to carry.
Chaos often brings life while order brings habit.
Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.
When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before.
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
I like to say that arms are not for killing. They are for hugging.
Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow.
Falling down is part of life; getting back up is living.
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
It’s far better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone.
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.
There is no material with which human beings work which has so much potential energy as words.
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
Adults who are racked with death anxiety are . . . men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality.
The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world.
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
Adulthood is overrated; maturity is underrated.
Laughter is inner jogging.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.
The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand, and touch another person.
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Small islands not capable of protecting themselves are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
Language actually interferes with communication . . . it gets in the way like an over-dominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else. Words aren’t always the most reliable thing.
We don’t need to see where the staircase leads to take the first step.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.
Every student needs someone who says, simply, You mean something. You count.
What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
If Moses had been a committee, the Israelites would still be in Egypt.
A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
If Columbus had had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.
Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.
Happiness is having a large, loving, close-knit family — in another city.
Baseball is like a Wagnerian opera — 10 minutes of excitement packed into 4 hours.
When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, we will discover — too late — that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, Mother, what was war?
War, at its heart, is a paradox. We are all appalled by it but also entranced by it. War is devastating, but it also brings about huge social and medical inventions. War appeals to the worst of human strengths, but it inspires ideals and qualities that are rarely seen in peacetime. And, above all, war is what happens when the things that we want to live for are worth dying for.
Those who go to college and never get out are called professors.
Commerce links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.
If I had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I would unhesitatingly choose the latter.
We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.
Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
The most beautiful discovery that true friends can make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought.
You only find out who is entirely naked when the tide goes out.
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays in the palm; clutch it, and it darts away.
History is written by the victors.
Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
Nothing is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself.
The mind of a bigot is likened to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
To have and not to give is often worse than to steal.
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
Aphorisms respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, but briefly.
Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.
Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.
Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.
The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth.
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time nobody notices.
There will be no real content among American women unless they are . . . given equal opportunity with men….. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.
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.
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.
Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious of the rose.
A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?
Progress lies not in what is enhancing, but in advancing of what will be.
It is well to give when asked but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.
Forgetfulness is a form of freedom.
He who listens to truth is not less than he who utters truth.
Love is trembling happiness.
Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
We wanderers begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.
If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
The U.S. is under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.
The more corrupt the state, the more laws.
Courage demands a temporary surrender of security.
There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.
O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed; courage to change what should be changed; and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowardice.
Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
Leap, and the net will appear.
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
Trouble, like the hill ahead, straightens out when you advance upon it.
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Women and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are endangered.
We must constantly build dykes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
A king can stand people fighting but he can’t last long if people start thinking.
If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.
It often takes more courage to change one’s opinion than to stick to it.
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying … that he is wiser today than yesterday.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held, and not in the dogma or want of dogma, that the danger lies.
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor is the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
We are restless because of incessant change, but we would be frightened if change were stopped.
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 been opened for us.
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith — God felt by the heart, not by the reason.
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first. Nationalism is when hate for people other than your own comes first.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.
Fear succeeds crime – it is its punishment.
The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
Character is Destiny.
The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.
Humor is the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life.
Those who travel the high road of humility . . . are not bothered by heavy traffic.
Let us believe neither half of the good people tell us of ourselves, nor half the evil they say of others.
Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
It is fairly obvious that those who are in favour of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.
Many commit the same crimes with a very different result. One bears a cross for his crime; another a crown.
Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.
To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
In nature, there is no such thing as death. From each sad moment of decay, some forms of life arise.
You can hide the fire, but what are you going to do to rid the smoke?
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Choices are the hinges of destiny.
You don’t get to choose how or when you’re going to die. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now!.
A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.
Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn’t come with it.
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
Deliberation often loses a good chance.
Nothing at all will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.
Stars cannot shine without darkness.
Some days you tame the tiger. And some days the tiger has you for lunch.
The world is round, and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
All things come round to him who will but wait.
Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.
Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
The secret of patience … to do something else in the meantime.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
The better part of valor is discretion.
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.
Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.
Gardening is an exercise in optimism.
We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.
There is one thing certain, namely, that we can have nothing certain; therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain.
He who laughs, lasts.
Thou should not eat to live; not live to eat.
Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.
If you educate a man you educate a person, but if you educate a woman, you educate a family.
Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.
By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.
Schoolmasters and parents exist to be grown out of.
If you think education is expensive – try ignorance.
Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.
Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
None but yourself who are your greatest foe.
The test of pleasure is the memory it leaves behind.
The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
There are three ingredients in the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.
People who never get carried away should be.
The real difference between men is energy.
Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
No one grows old by living, only by losing interest in living.
Years wrinkle the face, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
The most important thing about Spaceship Earth – an instruction book didn’t come with it.
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.
Air pollution is turning Mother Nature prematurely gray.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
An error gracefully acknowledged is a victory won.
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
Judge each day not by its harvest, but by the seeds you plant.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
Sleep: The golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.
The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
Turn your stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
One cannot get through life without pain…. What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.
One loses many laughs by not laughing at oneself.
Wrinkles should only indicate where smiles have been.
Children have more need of models than of critics.
An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded.
Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.
To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.
The best brewer sometimes makes bad beer.
It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
He who is shipwrecked the second time cannot lay the blame on the sea.
Life is a series of relapses and recoveries.
A mistake is not a failure, but rather it’s evidence that someone tried to do something.
Failure is a disappointment but not defeat.
Failure is not in losing, but in no longer believing that winning is worthwhile.
Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.
People fail forward to success.
We fail more often by timidity than by over-daring.
Failure is something made only by those who fail to dare, not by those who dare to fail.
Failure is not sweet, but it need not be bitter.
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. And LOW, no one was there!
Faith is the daring of the soul to go farther than it can see.
Faith is like radar that sees through the fog-the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.
Faith is to believe what we do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
Faith is a passionate intuition.
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
There are no illegitimate children – only illegitimate parents.
As a general thing, when a woman wears the pants in a family, she has a good right to them.
The thing that impresses me most about North America is the way parents obey their children.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Babies are such a nice way to start people.
Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Children have become so expensive that only the poor can afford them.
Adolescence is when children start trying to bring up their parents.
In most states you can get a driver’s license when you’re sixteen years old, which made a lot of sense to me when I was sixteen years old but now seems insane.
I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
A child prodigy is one with highly imaginative parents.
I love being a great-grandparent, but what I hate is being the mother of a grand-parent.
Keep in mind. . . to a dog you are family, to a cat you are staff.
Farmers . . . are the founders of civilization.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.
Fashion can be bought. Style one must possess.
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.
Fashion condemns us to many follies; the greatest is to make oneself its slave.
The lady declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility, which religion is powerless to bestow.
Fashions fade – style is eternal.
Whatever limits us we call Fate.
Fate rules the affairs of mankind with no recognizable order.
When its time has come, the prey goes to the hunter.
We make our fortunes and we call them fate.
The child is father of the man.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty.
As many people die from an excess of timidity as from bravery.
The more I travel, the more I realize that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.
We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. Why, as men do — do the great ones eat up the little ones?
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
It is easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar.
The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
A hungry man is not a free man.
If you ask the hungry man how much is two and two, he replies four loaves.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
If a man take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.
And when he is out of sight, quickly also he is out of mind.
Keeping score of old scores and scars, getting even and one-upping, always make you less than you are.
To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
Forgiveness means letting go of the past.
I can have peace of mind only when I forgive rather than judge.
Good, to forgive; Best, to forget.
It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend.
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
Friends are relatives you make for yourself.
The rich know not who is his friend.
It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
In life it is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.
When my friends lack an eye, I look at them in profile.
It is better in times of need to have a friend rather than money.
With true friends . . . even water drunk together is sweet enough.
Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.
It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Parents are friends that life gives us; friends are parents that the heart chooses.
Give and take makes good friends.
The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.
It is easier to visit friends than to live with them.
Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet.
In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Almost the length of the river if past before you learn how to float, at last — before you learn you cannot foreknow the route of the river — not halt its flow.
My doctor said I look like a million dollars – green and wrinkled.
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make easier don’t need to be done.
In the rubble of your trouble lies the seed of what you need.
Good company upon the road is the shortest cut.
If you always live with those who are lame, you will yourself learn to limp.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
She: ‘Before we got married, you told me you were well-off.’ He: ‘I was and didn’t know it.’ Jacob Braude, U.S. writer of wit and humor books)
I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.
I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Time It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
When you counsel someone, you should . . . be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
Luck can be assisted. It is not all chance with the wise.
To move freely you must be deeply rooted.
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Walking is also an ambulation of mind.
Hard-core pornography is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.
Grow whole, not old!
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent . . . will go to seed if he always remains in the same place.
A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent . . . will go to seed if he always remains in the same place.
The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.
Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
Taxation is how the sheep are shorn.
The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
There is but one good throw upon the dice, which is to throw them away.
The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.
Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
A gentleman is man who can disagree without being disagreeable.
Why always, not yet? Do flowers in spring say, not yet?
Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.
As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
The poor man is not he who is without a cent, but he who is without a dream.
If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?
By night an atheist half-believes in God.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.
The soul that has no established aim loses itself.
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows, must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.
One cannot manage too many affairs: like pumpkins in the water, one pops up while you try to hold down the other.
Your goal should be out of reach but not out of sight.
On the human chessboard, all moves are possible.
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither praise nor reward, though sure of both at last.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
The best-loved man or maid in the town would perish with anguish could they hear all that their friends say in the course of a day.
Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you.
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
The road to democracy is not a freeway. It is a toll road on which we pay by accepting and carrying out our civic responsibilities.
Man’s capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man’s capacity for good makes democracy possible.
The point to remember is that what the Government gives it must first take away.
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
The majority is the best way, because it is visible, and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Don’t overdo it.
A house divided against itself cannot stand – I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
It seems to me that government is like a pump, and what it pumps up is just what we are, a fair sample of the intellect, the ethics and the morals of the people, no better, no worse.
Gratitude is the heart’s memory.
Clever men are impressed in their differences from their fellows. Wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them.
Great and good are seldom the same man.
His eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding landscape.
It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
There’s a pinch of the madman in every great man.
The biggest dog has been a pup.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
We can’t always choose the music life plays for us, but we can choose how we dance to it.
The university must be a place so devoted to intellectual inquiry that academic freedom is upheld even in the face of extreme economic, social, and political pressures. B3 Sometimes this means we are perceived as contributing to the turbulence. Yet we know that the country has benefited in recent times from robust, uncomfortable, and sometimes harsh debates in the understanding of complex issues, however painful that understanding may be.
Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates and anger so stubbornly is becausethey sense, once hate or anger is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
Participating in the arts–drawing, dancing, and all that—makes the soul grow. That’s why you engage in it. That’s how you grow a soul.
Some men see things as they are and say, ‘why?’ I dream things that never were, and say, ‘Why not?’
I had rather be hated for what I am than be loved for what I am not.
It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
If you want to succeed, be like a duck: above the surface act serene and calm, but below the surface, paddle like crazy.
It is better to die on your feet, than live on your knees.
As soon as I place the blame for my failure upon someone else, I limit my opportunities for growth
Bullying is children experimenting with social power.
You must do things you think you cannot do.
Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore) Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me) I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Abortion foes and pro-choicers can arrive at ‘common ground’ – adoption.
When government becomes a lawbreaker, it’s an invitation to anarchy.
Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – for I was not a socialistThen they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out – for I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a JewThen they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out.
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Each departed friend is a magnet that attracts us to the next world.
To define it is to confine it.
Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your wordsyour words become your actionsyour actions become your habitsyour habits become your characteryour character becomes your destiny.
We human beings have a tendency to make absolute judgments, to judge what happens in terms of black and white. But life is far more complex: as the Gospel says, ‘wheat and chaff go together.’
Education is what survives when what you have learned has been forgotten.
Sometimes our institutions, the schools, are like sand dunes in the desert�shaped more by influences than purposes.
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
When two egoists meet, it becomes a situation of an I for an I.
The finest diamonds occur under the hottest heat.
Parties on either side who follow the rule of an ‘eye for an eye’ soon find themselves totally blind.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
A form of governance in which resistance is feudal.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Enhancing the freedom of some usually means depriving the freedom of others.
Enhancing the freedom of some usually means depriving the freedom of others.
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
Friends are quiet angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.
In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprisfor the poor and socialism for the rich.
You are my other me, we are mirrors of each other. If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself. If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself.
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates and anger so stubbornly is becausethey sense, once hate or anger is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
There is no shame in accepting one’s mistakes; the shame is in concealing one’s mistakes and letting the next generation quietly inherit horrors they had no part in.
History is written by the victors.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.
The power to investigate is a great public trust.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
It’s haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.
Remember the three Ds: Do it, Delegate it, or Dump it.
The trouble with life is you’re halfway through before you realize it’s a do-it-yourself project
We are all part of the Ocean of Consciousness – in its beauty, vibrancy, majesty, power, expansiveness, and serenity. Each of us may be seen as a wave and never alone.
The extinction of a language is equivalent to the extinction of a species…. If we lose a different way of linguistically organizing thought, we lose a possible way of seeing reality.
The three major administration problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone—but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
If men and women really suit each other . . . they should live next door—and just visit now and then.
Treat your wastebaskets like babies: Keep them within reach at all times, feed them frequently, and change them often.
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
A misty morning does not signify a cloudy day.
The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.
Come Mothers and fathers throughout the land. And don’t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and daughters are beyond your command.
When a newborn child squeezes for the first time with his tiny fist his father’s finger, he has him trapped forever.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you wereborn in it.
When a whole nation is roaring ‘Patriotism’ at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of heart.
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Problems are opportunities in overalls.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
It takes a friend and an enemy, working in concert, to hurt you to the core: the enemy to slander you and the friend to tell you about it.
When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps. Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love, and practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Religion is at its best when it relies on the strength of argument; it is at its worst when it seeks to impose truth by force.
Retirement means twice the spouse and half the income.
For your tomorrow, we gave our today.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Silence in the face of injustice is complicity with the oppressor.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – for I was not a socialistThen they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out – for I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a JewThen they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out.
The most tragic legacy that slavery bequeathed to America is one the country has yet to overcome: The two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are also unable to separate entirely or combine.
We must draw the critical connections between lives lost to intentional violent acts and lives lost to structural injustices – impoverishment and inequality – around the world.
Participating in the arts–drawing, dancing, and all that—makes the soul grow. That’s why you engage in it. That’s how you grow a soul.
For people who want to succeed in life, the following four-letter words are recommended: ‘work’, ‘risk’, ‘guts’, and ‘zest’.
The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.
Technology is literally an extension of man, as the ax is an extension of the hand, the wheel as an extension of the foot. Communications technology, on the other hand, is an extension of thought, of consciousness, of man’s unique perceptual capacities. Thus, communication media, broadly used to include all modes all symbolic representation, are literally extensions of mind.
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion — these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.
You can only move forward until you get out of reverse, such as through the Truth and Reconciliation process.
Seek and keep the company of those who are looking for the truth, and runaway from those who have found it.
�You must have uncertainty confusion, chaoswithin you to give birth to a dancing star.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
There are more than 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, our galaxyThere are 100 million such galaxies in the universeThere are many universes.
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
War is only good for the countries who sell the weapons.
Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.
It is not just what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
The excesses of our youth are drafts of our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date. (Charles Caleb Colton, English cleric, writer and collector, well known for his eccentricities, 1780-1832
It takes a long time to become young.
Do you know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
Contemporary audiences tend to go towards books and plays which deal with actual events, believing that what happens in life is real and what an artist creates is not. In doing so, they fail to recognize how much more valuable than the real thing the unreal thing can be if it tells us the truth about that thing.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
We live in a world of continuous partial attention.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
I tend to think that those who leave us will live even stronger in our lives as the years go by.
Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.
Capitalism desacralizes nature and makes it a commodity for exploitation and profit.
The evils of free-market capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
The block of granite which is an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the pathway of the strong.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Every man possesses three characters: that which he exhibits, that which he really has, and that which he believes he has.
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.
I will believe that corporations are real people when Texas decides not to execute them.
If only closed minds came with closed mouths!
A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place.
People will believe a big lie sooner than they will a little lie, and if you repeat it often enough, people will, sooner or later, believe it.
People change and forget to tell each other.
If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is the artistry of democracy.
All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.
If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.
Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience.
When plunder [corruption] becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves . . . a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Don’t be afraid to take a big step. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
Creativity is the residue of wasted time.
The value of education is not as much the amount of knowledge as it is the ability to question knowledge – ‘better a well molded than a filled mind.’
Without the freedom to criticize, there is no true praise.
A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
If the U.S. entered the war WWI to make the world safe for democracy, she needed first to make democracy safe in America.
I have studied [the dictionary] often, but I never could discover the plot.
If even one percent of our defense budget were given to diplomacy, it would quadruple the amount we are currently spending on diplomacy.
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so we weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order more sanely to judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think.
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be lessbecause of the missing drop.
You can get busy living, or get busy dying.
How inappropriate it is to call this planet ‘Earth’ when it is quite clearly ocean.
The forests are my lungs outside the body.
Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.
[We have] socialism for the rich and rugged free-market capitalism for the poor.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.
Read one thousand books AND walk one thousand miles.
An education that teaches us to understand something about the world has done only half of the assignment. The other half is for us to learn to do something about making the world a better place.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
As long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
Equaity delayed is justice denied.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own; it is simply a lack of light. In order to cause a shadow— or evil—to disappear, you must shine light on it.
No matter how exalted we think ourselves, how high we have risen, we nevertheless bear the indelible stamp of our lowly origin . . . from so simple a beginning-endless forms, most beautiful, most wonderful, have been or are being evolved.
Experience is not what happens to people; it is what they do with what happens to them.
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.
Live below your means but within your needs.
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Those who cannot forgive others break the bridge over which they themselves must pass.
Freedom is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
Good friends are like quilts; they age with you, yet never lose their warmth.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don’t die, they became fearful of women’s power.
When men realized that women bleed every month and don’t die, they became fearful of women’s power.
Life is a foreign language; most men mispronounce it.
There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.
If you want something talked about, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
A gulf of unshared experience gapes between generations.
Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.
It’s never too late to be what you might have been.
We all have two choices: We can make a living OR we can design a life.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
We’ve been warned against letting the golden hours slip by, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
Earth has enough for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.
A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. 897-1962
Study the past if you divine the future.
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or un-indebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the ‘truth.’
History is often overly informed by memory rather than by assessing the facts, telling the story, and rendering a judgment.
Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened but of what people believe happened.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you will see.
There is no one history. Rather, there are just historical perspectives by individuals and/or groups that help piece together chains of events that help explain the past.
Honor grows from qualms.
Life is a long lesson in humility.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the world.
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.
One must pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while still alive.
There isn’t a single square inch of the world that hasn’t been stolen. In other words, there is no place in the world that has not been stolen or taken from someone else. Countries talk about hereditary borders, but such talk is nonsense There’s always been someone else there before.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
Great progress flows from once laughable ideas – such as moon colonization.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.
In taming our inner dragons, the energy of old and, often, unconscious habits and personal complexes may too frequently overpower our fragile intentions.
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy,and literature than any number of dull arguments.
The arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
If people empty their purse into their heads, no one can take it away from them, for an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
The desire of knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Language is anonymous, collective, and unconscious, the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.
Stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis.
No man, or body of men, can dam the stream of language.
While some dolphins are reported to have learned English — up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his brain
Language is the armory of the human mind; at once it contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Language is a city to which every human being brought a stone for the building of it.
Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; but the realist adjusts the sails.
Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. Similarly, there are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
I dreamed of a thousand paths. I awoke to find mine and to follow it.
An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
The first 25 years of your life, you learn; the next 25 years, you accumulate; the next 25 years, you try to get rid of everything.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
If only I may grow firmer, simpler — quieter, warmer.
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Beware of the military-industrial complex~ It may destroy within what it’s protecting from without.
The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
You can’t legislate morality.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
He who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, explore the glen, stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
The Negro knows nothing of Africa [said to have been expressed with pain and distress]
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
I always turn to the sports page first which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but people’s failures.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best — and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.
People want dignity, bread, and fairness and see their ruling elites as parasites gorging themselves on the labor of others.
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity.
Absence diminishes commonplace passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.
Those who have a why or what to live for can bear almost any how.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Just as war begins in the minds of men, so does peace.
How can a solution come if everyone is trying to gain more and more? Nobody yet has said, What can I give for a solution, what can I sacrifice to achieve peace?
If we are to reach real peace in this world . . . we shall have to begin with the children.
The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
Perfection is the enemy of good.
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that, said the Queen.
When nothing seems to help, I think of a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together.
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment – and nothing more corrupting.
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is the artistry of democracy.
All the peasant revolutions of the 20th century have been against the predatory and disruptive effects of capitalism.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything related to politics. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Political equality is meaningless in the face of economic inequality.
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
As long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
Principles should be guideposts, not roadblocks.
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
So much in the world has been destroyed that I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural – while it was recent.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you . . . and you win.
Political action is best when it accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
To engage in serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of people of color, but with the flaws of American society-flaws rested in historic inequalities and stereotypes.
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.
If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.
Never cut what you can untie.
Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities in every department of human life — except religion.
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
The role of religion should be to inculcate a sense not of infallibility but of humility.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
A cult is a religion with no political power.
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
Religious canons all too often lead to cannons!
It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it.
If architects want to strengthen an old arch, they put more weight on it.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember: Amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.
There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any
Life isn’t about finding oneself. Life is about creating oneself.
The ring always believes that the finger lives for it.
I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
God created sex; priests created marriage.
Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
When you feel less than, you spend more than.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
For sleep, riches and health to be truly enjoyed, they must be interrupted.
The welfare of each of us is dependent upon the welfare of all of us.
The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Winning a game has never been my standard of success; rather, it’s the sense of satisfaction when I’ve done the best of my capability.
In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.
The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
The important thing is not somuch that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only a page.
Those who wander are not necessarily lost.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
A person is a person through other persons.
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
America – the nation of the bullet as well as the ballot, and unlikely to change.
A man without a vote is a man without protection.
War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomatic skill.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.
War is the enemy of the poor.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social upliftis is approaching spiritual doom.
There is nothing…to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Wisdom is having a lot to say and not always saying it.
Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.
The status of women in a country is a good indicator of the health of its economy.
Some words in a dictionary are very much like a car in a large motor show — full of potential, but temporarily inactive.
By words the mind is winged.
Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run.
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in.
Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in.
Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, I speak as a citizen of the world without others saying, God, what a nut.
How do I know what I think until I see what I write?
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.
The greatest gift of youth is to be unaware that life is fragile.
Do not regret growing older; it is a privilege denied to many.
You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
Anger is the camouflage of sadness.
The moral progress of a nation can be judged by the way it treats its animals.
Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls.
Until one has loved an animal, part of their soul remains unawakened.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Art is a form of perceptual gymnastics.
One should strive not to lie in a negative sense by remaining silent.
What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.
Bigotry toward diverse forms of humanity (race, gender, ability, languagestems from the 
same root – an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic 
human force, one which is enriching, rather than threatening, when there are shared goals.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.
Character develops in the full current of human life.
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
The strongest person in any room is the one who speaks the least.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
We are in the world in relationship with others. Our capacity to realize our own objectives is inextricably wrapped up with the capacity of others to realize theirs.
Organizers need to be well-integrated schizoids – ready to polarize in order to mobilize people and then be able to depolarize in order to settle matters.
My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask whynot?
Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
Free and fair elections are a necessary – but not sufficient – condition of democracy.
Democracy is a system of constructive contention.
Some tortures are physical / And some are mental, / But the one that is both / Is dental.
Dictionaries are spellbinders.
Intuition ad creativity are informed by practice and diligence.
Discipline and creativity are like yin and yang. Both are entirely different and yet without each other, they are nothing.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much less dissent.
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
One and Many One flame, many candles; one sky, many stars; one sea, many rivers . . .
Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.
Waiting for consensus about how fast the earth is warming before acting is like being on a plane falling from the sky and bickering about the rate of descent.
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Education is the most powerful weapon that we can use to change the world.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness.
What is the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on.
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
No longer can inequality in economic resources balance equality in political resources.
There is a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Failure is sometimes a matter of not trying rather than not succeeding.
Failure is often the fire that forges the steel.
Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.
The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
A friend is a masterpiece of nature.
The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.
Women are not going to become more equal outside the home until men become more equal inside the home.
Don’t do onto others what you would not want done onto you.
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way; on a quiet day I can hear her breathing.
We are teaching the world the great truth that governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of government.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over Windows versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi, and boxers versus briefs.
A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools.
When leaving an inheritance to one’s heirs, the perfect amount is enough money so they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.
The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable.
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.
Every human being’s essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature.
People neglect their own fields and go weed the fields of others.
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who make things happen: and those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what happened.
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
Information is not knowledge.
For big disruptive ideas, look for people who have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different is insanity.
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Intuition ad creativity are informed by practice and diligence.
You have to have an egg to make an omelet
We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Journalism provides the first draft of history.
That sorrow that is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy that is followed by sorrow.
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makesdemocracy necessary.
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
You live a new life for every new language you speak.
Laughter is the liberation of the soul.
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
Liberty without wisdom and virtue is the greatest of all possible evils.
A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.
There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Reading print is one form of literacy, but there are many types of literacy. Some indigenous groups such as native Americans can read the clouds, or Pacific Islanders are said to be able to read the waves and swells of the ocean.
No, no, you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical.
Anything you lose . . . automatically doubles in value.
Power without love cannot be just; similarly, love that doesn’t take power seriously can never achieve justice.
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. It leads us to a wondrous path of being able to negotiate, to engage in dialogue, and to make compromises on a daily basis.
Life is not so much about the breath that we take but rather about those moments that take our breath away – those precious memories.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master.
What is up if you know nothing of down?
A mother is only as happy as her least happy child.
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
Parenting is a lifetime sentence.
Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide. Those who look outwards dream but those who look inwards awake.
It takes a lot of courage to be weak.
In reflecting on your past, don’t obscure the future.
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.
If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress.
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
Before reading and writing was poetry.
A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics.
The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity.
A hungry man is not a free man.
Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.
The big thieves hang the little ones.
Power without love cannot be just; similarly, love that doesn’t take power seriously can never achieve justice.
No longer can inequality in economic resources balance equality in political resources.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison door.
When you open a school, you close a jail.
The privatization of the prisons is not private, not free, and hardly enterprise. It is the further subsidization of corporations at the expense of taxpayers.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but that two or three words can dishearten it.
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
The profession of book writing makes horseracing seem like a solid, stable business.
The arrogance of reason has separated us from the essence of love.
Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
We have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Liberty without responsibility is not true liberty.
I feel like an aeroplane at the end of a long flight, in the dusk . . . in search of a safe landing.
What kind of man would live where there is no daring?
Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason . . . that so very few are offended by it.
It is of no consequence what others think of you. What matters is what you think of them.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you found out why.
Most people think that shadows follow, precede, or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses, and memories.
Sin is geographical.
You never want to try to strengthen a weakness if it weakens your strength.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.
The master is as tied to the slave as the slave is tied to the master.
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.
There are so many gifts still unopened from the day of your birth.
We are the best teachers when we are active learners.
Time is the coin of your life. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Our moment on stage is so brief, but if you can be aware of the ingredients that make up the stage upon which you live your life, you can enjoy the dance of life ever so much more.
It is through travel that we catch a glimpse of the unity, the continuous and the discrete, the forest and the trees -the pieces of the mosaic that give us the sum of life.
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrumentfor the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
One and Many One flame, many candles; one sky, many stars; one sea, many rivers . . .
The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Any fool can start a war. It takes courage to stop one.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced.
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust that its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.
WHAT IS TO GIVE LIGHT MUST SOMETIMES ENDURE BURNING.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Words are but the signs of ideas.
Words are like money … it is the stamp of custom alone that gives them circulation or value.
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.
We have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best.
I and the public know. / What all schoolchildren learn. / Those to whom evil is done. / Do evil in return.
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
Better to light a candle than to sit and curse the dark.
Growing old may be mandatory, but growing up is optional.
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.
If you’re looking too far down the road, you’re not seeing what’s right in front of you.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
Until people have loved an animal, part of their soul remains unawakened.
The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
Art should be like a holiday: something to give people the opportunity to see things differently and to change their point of view.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence are wealth without work; pleasure without conscience; knowledge without character; commerce without morality; science without humanity; worship without sacrifice; and politics without principle.
Books are humanity in print.
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us.
No two persons ever read the same book.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
A brother is a friend given by nature.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you won’t see the shadows.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star.
There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
The power to define the situation is the ultimate power.
The power of all corporations ought to be limited . . . . The growing wealth accumulated by them never fails to be a source of abuses.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
You never feel so alive as when you are close to death.
As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.
In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.
The test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Freedom is on the other side of discipline.
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
Unlearned in history, people allow themselves to be governed by the Unknown Past.
Education is the vaccination for prevention of poverty.
It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.
Many people consider the things government does for them to be Social Progress, but theregard the things government does for others as Socialism.
When we show respect for other living things, they show respect for us.
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
When all Americans are treated as equal, all are free.
The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it’s private property.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
Perfect can be the enemy of good.
Faith is knowing there is an ocean when you can only see the stream.
Fame is very agreeable, but . . . it goes on 24 hours a day.
Fear-prophets – and those prepared to die for the truth – as a rule, make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
The trouble with the times is that the future just isn’t what it used to be!
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The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others.
In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others.
The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others.
A friend is someone who sees right through and likes the show.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
No one has ever become poor by giving.
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.
Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
Everyone is broken by life, but afterward many are strong in the broken places.
People hate as they love, unreasonably.
I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.
What is history but a fable that is agreed upon?
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something on creates.
Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
The U.S. incarcerates more people than China – an authoritarian state – with 4 times the U.S. population.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
International education turns nations into people.
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
Make no judgments where you have no compassion.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
Once you label me you negate me.
Language is an anonymous, collective, and unconscious art – the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.
Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant reinvigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.
Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues.
Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
The strength of a language does not lie in rejecting what is foreign but in assimilating it.
Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.
The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable or compressible at the whim of the editor.
A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.
A different language is a different vision of life.
To lead people, walk behind them.
Be ashamed to die until you’ve scored some victory for humanity.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
We can afford no liberties with liberty itself.
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
Life is to be lived forward, but understood backward.
We learn to read, so we can read to learn.
There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.
To love and feel loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
Masturbation is the primary sexual activity of mankind. In the nineteenth century, it was a disease; in the twentieth, it’s a cure.
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
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.
The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
Mirrors – those revealers of the truth – are hated; but that does not prevent them from being of use.
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Pick a flower on earth and you move the farthest star.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason.
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from that of their social environment.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
People who are hurting hurt others.
What’s done to children, they will do to society.
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
Patience is also a form of action.
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
The man who is always waving the flag usually waives what it stands for.
Imagine there’s no country, / It isn’t hard to do. / Nothing to kill or die for, / And no religion, too. / Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.
Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
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.
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.
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.
Pleasure may come from illusion, but happiness can come only of reality.
If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world.
Those who have the ability to make you believe absurdities have the ability to make you commit atrocities.
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
The power to define the situation is the ultimate power.
If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.
Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones.
What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’ -and ‘who is marching’ outside the White House, pushing for change.
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
If people are generous, empathic, and charitable, does it matter whether theybelieve in a messiah or a prophet?
Spiritual truth is universal; as such, it is the property of no one religion.
In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.
The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.
The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.
If one is to be ultimately at peace with himself . . . what he can be, he must be.
Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others.
Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail (armorthat none can pierce.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Many people consider the things government does for them to be Social Progress, but theregard the things government does for others as Socialism.
What’s done to children, they will do to society.
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.
I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Stories unite people: theories divide them.
A good example is worth a thousand theories.
A good example is worth a thousand theories.
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
[As a president] you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history.
Our government has become a clearinghouse for corporations and plutocrats whose dollars grease the wheels for lucrative contracts and easy regulation.
Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.
Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars on poverty are fought to map change.
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
Words are the small change of thought.
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
The greatest analgesic, soporific, stimulant, tranquilizer, narcotic, and to some extent even antibiotic — in short, the closest thing to a genuine panacea — known to medical science is work.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
The question is whether you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.
Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on the top.
Addiction is suicide in slow motion.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
People are like bicycles; they can keep their balance only as long as they keep moving.
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.
How does one become a butterfly? … You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.
An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will avoid one hundred days of sorrow.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
It is the questions in life that move us forward, not the answers.
A good apology is like anti-biotic, a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.
Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.
Art is a lie that helps us realize the truth.
Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.
Not that I want to be a god or a hero – just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
What we assume – what we have never clearly thought out – controls us.
Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be a value.
Angry gods should not act just like humans.
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.
Life is a dance between making it happen . . . and letting it happen.
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.
Bigotry is the harvest of the persistent seeds of intolerance that is planted in ground — ground that has been plowed by fear and watered by greed.
I would suggest that today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Only the closed mind is certain.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
It’s not how hard you hit. It’s how hard you get hit in life . . . and keep moving forward.
We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or . . . build with them.
Tough times never last, but tough people do.
The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done. Then they begin to hope it can be done. Then they see it can be done. Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Everything has changed, except our way of thinking.
It is not the strongest of the species that survive – nor the most intelligent – but the one most responsive to change.
The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.
What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give.
Civility is not a sign of weakness.
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
The true test of a civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops — no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
Feel the wounded heart that’s underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.
Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.
I am only one, / But still I am 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.
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
We live in a world in which we have more diatribe and less dialogue.
The medium is the Message.
He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
A timid question will always receive a confident answer.
Sometimes you win: sometimes you learn.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
He who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman … because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
A consultant is someone who saves his client almost enough to pay his fee.
A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
Think for yourself and question authority.
You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
Courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.
Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
We criticize people for not giving us what we ourselves are afraid to ask for.
I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
With the honest knowledge that one day I will die can I ever truly begin to live.
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
A dictionary is the universe in alphabetical order.
Broken people are beautiful. They have to put themselves back together every day.
Disbelief is a form of belief.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen but thinking what nobody has thought.
Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.
I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that’s ever happened to me has taught me compassion.
Diversity is the art of thinking independently together.
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Unless you have the courage to doubt you will never come to know the truth.
Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
For every generation, democracy must be born anew, with education as its midwife.
If your vision is for one year, plant rice; If your vision is for 10 years, plant trees. But if your vision is for 100 years, educate youth.
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open mind.
The mind, once enlightened, cannot again be dark.
Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.
The highest result of education is tolerance.
School vouchers are sold as a way for parents to handpick schools that reinforce values taught at home, but a democracy requires critical thinkers who are exposed to new ideas.
We all do better when we all do better.
Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the home shorefor a very long time.
The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.
I did not fail two thousand times. I merely found two thousand ways not to make a lightbulb.
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.
All some folks want is their fair share and yours.
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
The attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.
Sometimes what you fear the most is the very thing that will set you free.
Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.
Men are not against you [women]; they are merely for themselves.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute.
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
As I walked toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.
A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Civilization exists with geologic consent, subject to change without notice.
Giving rarely moves in a straight line; it usually moves in circles.
A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose.
Goals are only wishes unless you have a plan.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become loyal to performing daily trivia until we become enslaved by it.
When you don’t know what harbor you’re aiming for, no wind is the right wind.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
God is in you as the ocean is in the wave.
Knowing all truth is less than doing a little bit of good.
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
The soul of the grandchild lives in the heart of the grandmother.
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Sometimes we can’t find the thing that will make us happy, because we can’t let go of the thing that was supposed to.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
History is a novel whose author is the people.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
On the outer limits of cruelty humanity begins.
I feel we are all islands — in a common sea.
It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs — jolted by every pebble in the road.
If you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.
An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
It is harder to conceal ignorance than to acquire knowledge.
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination.
Knowledge is limited, but imagination encircles the world.
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self,and looks on everything with an impartial eye.
I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution.
We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.
You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.
Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
The world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.
If you want to enjoy intimacy, you must learn to enjoy pain.
I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel a nibble, then you’ve got to hook the fish.
If I [Henry Ford] had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
If you have a job without any aggravations, you don’t have a job.
No job is beneath you. You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom, and when you get there, be really great at sorting mail.
What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.
As a general truth, communities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practice or neglect to practice the primary duties of justice and humanity.
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless.
Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.
People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals that do not inspire them.
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.
One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies?
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
An unexamined life is not worth living.
When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.
Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time.
Success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.
A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.
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.
We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
If it bleeds, it leads
If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Enjoy this bewilderment. It leads us to a wondrous path of being able to negotiate, to engage in dialogue, and to make compromises on a daily basis.
I use memories but I do not allow memories to use me.
Memory is the scribe of the soul.
Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
When the white missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
No man’s credit is as good as his money.
The term working mother is ridiculously redundant.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Dare to be naive.
Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. Never do anything against conscience – even if the state demands it.
Imagine there’re no countries, / It isn’t hard to do. / Nothing to kill or die for, / And no religion, too. / Imagine all the people / Living life in peace.
Protect net neutrality so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Non-violence means avoiding not only external physical violence, but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
The obstacle is the path.
Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t, you will see obstacles.
Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.
The pain of holding on is always greater than the pain of letting go.
A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.
Let your children go if you want to keep them.
Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young, / Who loved thee so fondly as he? / He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, / And joined in thy innocent glee.
Stop breathing life into the past. It died for a reason.
The longer you live in the past, the less future you have to enjoy.
The past has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.
The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it
Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.
When you change the way you view things, the things you look at change.
It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see.
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
Burn brightly without burning out.
What one needs in life are the pessimism of intelligence and the optimism of will.
To see the other side, to defend another people, not despite our tradition but because of it, is the heart of pluralism. We have to save each other. It is the only way to save ourselves.
Politeness is the most acceptable hypocrisy.
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, but they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.
He serves his party best who serves the country best.
Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.
Those who put out the people’s eyes, reproach them for their blindness.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you won’t see the shadows.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
If a man points at the moon, an idiot will look at the finger.
You’re better off being rich and guilty in the U.S. than poor and innocent.
The best practice is inspired by theory. The best theory is inspired by practice
Praise does wonders for our sense of hearing.
The doctrine of the material efficacy of prayer reduces the Creator to a cosmic bellhop of a not very bright or reliable kind.
The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the axe.
The Corporate impulse for human uniformity instills shame at difference and, thus, the contemporary zeal for privacy.
Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Half a psychiatrist’s patients see him because they are married – the other half because they’re not.
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
You can’t reason someone out of something he didn’t reason himself into.
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.
In the end there doesn’t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.
Sometimes you have to love people from a distance and give them the space and time to get their minds right before you let them back into your life.
All relationships are important because they reveal the true nature of the relationship we have with ourselves.
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.
When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps. Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love, and practical cruelty in the name of the God of compassion.
O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make Gods by the dozen.
Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.
It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience, and recent scientific findings.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All religions, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
The Panama Canal was dug with a microscope.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, the true revolutionary is moved by feelings of love.
Jump and the net will appear.
Playing it safe is the riskiest choice we can ever make.
Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.
The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
People never leave a sinking ship until they see the lights of another ship approaching.
What others think of us would be of little moment had it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
We have met the enemy and he is us.
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
What other people think about you is none of your business.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Improvement begins with I.
Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.
Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.
Most of us grow up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.
The longest journey you will make in your life is from your head to your heart.
Shadow owes its birth to light.
Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
We have come to a point where it is loyalty to resist, and treason to submit.
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather; / To cheer one on the tedious way, / To fetch one if one goes astray, / To lift one if one totters down, / To strengthen whilst one stands.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
William James used to preach the ‘will-to-believe.’ For my part, I should wish to preach the ‘will-to-doubt.’ None of our beliefs are quite true. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
It’s a healthy thing to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
If there be sorrow / let it be / for things undone / undreamed / unrealized unattained / to these add one: / Love withheld … / restrained.
When the string of the violin was being tuned it felt the pain of being stretched, but once it was tuned, then it knew why it was stretched.
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
The telling question of a person’s life is one’s relationship with the infinite.
If you never budge, don’t expect a push.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis – most of us only take the first or second steps.
The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.
Teachers make all other professions possible.
Students tend not to care about how much a professor knows until they know how much he/she cares.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.
You will never find time for anything. You must make it.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends.
A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
Travel is always both a window and a mirror. Partly what you do is discover another place, and part of what you do is view yourself and your own country differently.
Nothing lasts forever – not even your troubles.
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Don’t keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions.
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which people prefer not to hear.
I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
The future is uncertain. But such uncertainty lies at the very heart of human creativity.
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.
You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.
There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.
He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
The best vision is insight.
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.
Not all wanderers are lost.
One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers . . . . Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons?
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Wisdom is a love affair with questions. Knowledge is a love affair with answers.
Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Answers are dangerous, for they kill your wonder.
By words the mind is winged.
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.
Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them in the name of morality.
The true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success.
Hard writing is easy reading; easy writing is hard reading.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly written.
Youth is wasted on the young.
I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruit than strict justice.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
In addition to marriage vows, vows before becoming parents should be established between partners.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
The question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I, or the others crazy?
Unfortunately, a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.
Age is simply the number of years the world has had to enjoy you!
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Own what you can always carry with you; know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your bag.
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
. . . while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is B1no party of principle.
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functionsperformed by private citizens.
Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.
Luck affects everything. Let your hook be always cast. In the stream where you least expect it; there will be fish.
Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves.
I can generally bear the separation, but I don’t like the leave-taking.
Never lend books – nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the home shore.
Travel is always both a window and a mirror. Partly what you do is discover another place, and part of what you do is view yourself and your own country differently.
Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.
People forget years and remember moments.
A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.
Evil brings men together.
Half a psychiatrist’s patients see him because they are married – the other half because they’re not.
Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.
A true friend never gets In your way unless you happen to be going down.
It is harder to conceal ignorance than to acquire knowledge.
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
Hasten slowly.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.
What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Middle age is when your narrow waist and broad mind begin to change places.
To follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.
All would live long, but none would be old.
Little boats should keep near shore.
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Real life is, to most men … a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Nothing fruitful ever comes when plants are forced to flower in the wrong season.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Disappointment is the nurse of wisdom.
Those things that hurt, instruct.
Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.
You, yourself, must make the effort. The buddhas are only teachers.
If a cock ruffles his feathers, he is easy to pluck.
Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.
To live is to change, and to be growing is to have changed often.
The healthy man does not torture others. Generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner … on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. . . . That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.
Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.
Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
Problems are the price of progress. Don’t bring me anything but trouble.
We do not go to the theatre . . . to escape the pressures of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Painting is the song of the brush.
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
A woman must not depend upon the protection of a man, but must be taught to protect herself.
We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Our life is made by the death of others.
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is todeclare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
The superior man is modest in his speech, but excels in his actions.
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
Through the picture, I see reality. Through the word, I understand it.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.
Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or conviction.
No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
Although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won.
Some of the best lessons are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom of the future.
People who make no mistakes lack boldness and the spirit of adventure. They are the brakes on the wheels of progress.
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
The world is too complicated to fit into one political system. . . . Progress is made by finding balance between competing truths – between freedom and security, diversity and solidarity.
In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.
Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
The U.S. assumes Canada to be bestowed as a right and accepts this bounty, as it does air, without thought or appreciation.
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears – by listening to them.
When you hit the pause button on a computer, it stops, but when you press the pause button on a human being, it starts.
He who is outside his door already has a hard part of his journey behind him.
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.
Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
Everyone is a prisoner of his/her own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices—justrecognize them.
Men are divided in opinion as to the facts. And even granting the facts, they explain them in different ways.
He drew a circle that shut me ouHeretic, rebel, a thing to floutBut love and I had the wit to winWe drew a circle that took him in.
A child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
Dogs come when they are called; cats take a message and get back to you.
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
It is better to die on your feet, than live on your knees.
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.
No one can build you a bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar, 1844-1900Protests: I would rather die standing in resistance than begging on my knees!
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
Everyone must row with the oars he has.
A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.
As you make your bed you must lie in it.
All philosophy in two words – sustain and abstain.
Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
Man is the only animal that can be bored.
The ultimate choices for a man . . . are to create or destroy, to love or to hate.
If I am what I have, and if I lose what I have, who then am I?
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough, and liked it, never really care for anything else.
Dancing is the body made poetic.
When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.
That fear of missing out on things makes you miss out on everything.
Among mortals, second thoughts are wisest.
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
Let’s hope . . . that Americans come to realize that Washington is dysfunctional not because of the venality of the politicians but rather because of the appetites of the people they represent [who want benefits and lowered taxes, but a balanced budget)
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Through others, we become ourselves.
The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body. After all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
No house should ever be on a hill, or on anything. It should be of the hill. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other.
I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the badluck of the early worm.
The seven social sins are: Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Commerce without morality; Science without humanity: Worship without sacrifice; Worship without sacrifice.
It is often hard to distinguish between the hard knocks in life and those of opportunity.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
In Heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
It’s not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; Nothing more difficult than understanding him.
Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do while you’re down there.
I stay away from natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.
Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone.
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.
Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them
I call architecture ‘petrified music’.
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant. His culture is based on I am not too sure.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.
We will either find a way, or make one.
The minute people fall in love, they become liars.
I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Measure not the work until the day’s out and the labor done.
The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.
Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s day to day living that wears you out.
To be blind is bad, but it is worse to have eyes and not see.
I believe that the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.
O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
Handsome is that handsome does.
Where the law ends tyranny begins.
Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.
A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.
Look around for a place to sow a few seeds.
Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
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.
If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.
Well begun is half done.
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.
The saddest aspect of life . . . is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
America is . . . the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! The Real American has not yet arrived . . . I tell you – he will be the fusion of all races, the common superman.
Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out.
I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.
Not all those who wander are lost.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
All sorts of spiritual gifts come through deprivations, if they are accepted.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.
How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour,And gather honey all the day from every opening flower.
The day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word human disappears from the race.
You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
A picture is a poem without words.
Painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.
A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Washington D.C. is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.
Opinion . . . is but knowledge in the making.
Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men.
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would still be an evil.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it
It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not; it’s a visa and it runs out fast.
Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Be not simply good; be good for something.
There is no lasting hope in violence, only temporary relief from hopelessness.
We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
It is the surmounting of difficulties that makes heroes.
He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
The artist has a special task and duty; the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
The U.S.’s national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of securitenjoyed by minorities.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.
We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of few. But we can’t have both.
What is food to one is to others bitter poison.
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world, remains and is immortal.
Doing what is right isn’t the problem; it’s knowing what is right.
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which though easy enough to understand is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.
The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.
There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not to be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place.
The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary. The evil it does is permanent.
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
The house does not rest on the ground, but upon a woman.
Fear to let fall a drop and you spill a lot.
To live your life in the fear of losing it is to lose the point of life.
Pay your people the least possible and you’ll get from them the same.
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
It is not death that a man should fear, but the fear of never beginning to live.
Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.
Nothing befalls a man except what is in his nature to endure.
The act of dying is one of the acts of life.
Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
There are some people that you cannot change, you must either swallow them whole or leave them alone.
There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he adores the flag.
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the grade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one who inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
For the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss, at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Great leaders use ambiguity but avoid unpredictability.
Life is to be lived forward but understood backward.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.
God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
Letting people be okay without us is how we get to be okay without them.
The ultimate paradox: Change is the only constant.
The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.
Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
A bachelor is one who enjoys the chase but does not eat the game.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domestic plants and animals, but rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.
A committee is a group of people who keep minutes and waste hours.
The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.
So often we try to alter circumstances to suit ourselves, instead of letting them alter us.
A woman is like a tea bag: you never know her strength until you drop her in hot water.
The bed has become a place of luxury to me! I would not exchange it for all the thrones in the world.
Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money.
Someone is Hindu, someone is Muslim, someone is Christian / Everyone is hell-bent on not becoming a human being.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Old age begins the day your descendants outnumber your friends.
Bigotry is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
True friends stab you in the front.
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Just when I changed all of life’s answers, they changed all the questions.
A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.
He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.
If fortune turns against you, even jelly breaks your tooth.
Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so.
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves.
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.
Nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing is so gentle as real strength.
The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.
Do not follow where the path leads. Rather, go where there is no path and leave a trail.
To learn the most important lessons of life, one must each day surmount a fear.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.
. . . within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.
There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.
When we live to love, we love to live.
Smiles are contagious. Pass them around.
Love isn’t love ’til you give it away.
Head-talk is for dealing. Heart-talk is for healing.
You don’t have to fix anyone. Just be available to do your part.
Healing happens when you get your thoughts, feelings, and actions into alignment.
Some see things as they are and say: Why? I dream things that never were and say: Why not?
The turtle only moves ahead by sticking out its neck.
Two roads diverged in the wood and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses. It is an idea that possesses the mind.
Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one who inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
There can be no good without evil.
If you were born lucky, even your rooster will lay eggs.
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Try again, fail again. Fail better.
People are lucky and unlucky . . . according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
One definition of success might be: refining our appetites, while deepening our hunger.
Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow.
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
I cried because I had no shoes. Then I saw a man who had no feet.
Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers than.
Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then.
If there is a door that might bring wind, close the door.
Whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.
When traveling, you learn who you are, and are not, when you’re splashed up against a foreign environment.
No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Pain is the root of knowledge.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
Life is to be lived forward but understood backward.
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
From a fallen tree, all make kindling.
From a fallen tree, all make kindling.
Drink nothing without seeing it, sign nothing without reading it.
The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.
You censure this with difficulty because you have allowed it to become customary
It is a good thing to learn caution by the misfortunes of others.
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
The family is a haven in a heartless world.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Happy are those who dream dreams and who are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn.
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.
Good is not good, where better is expected.
He that knows little, often repeats it.
A banker is a man who lends you an umbrella when the weather is fair, and takes it away from you when it rains.
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.
The liberty of discussion is the chief safeguard of all other liberties.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
Trying to kill slander keeps it alive; leave it to itself and it will die a natural death.
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Think for yourself and question authority.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.
Dissent is not only patriotic, it is the essence of what being an American is all about.
The challenge is to live consciously and intentionally.
It often shows a fine command of language to say nothing.
Call my bluff or take my guff.
Most problems are really the absence of ideas.
Some people have minds like cement—all mixed up and permanently set.
Great complexity is easier to perceive at times than great simplicity.
Better to suffer in a novel situation than to be comfortable in the same old rut.
The time to win a fight is before it starts.
Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
People can be divided into three groups: those who make things happen, those who watch thingshappen, and those who wonder what happened.
The tragedy of life is not in the fact of death, but in what dies inside while you live.
Nothing about human life is more precious than that we can define our own purpose and shape our own destiny.
We must each ask ourselves: What is the right and creative thing for me to do in this hour—and do it!
The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.
The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.
If you allow weak leadership, then you must contend with it.
The perfect helmsman is the one who risks with caution.
Study without action is futile; action without study is fatal.
The followership has a responsibility for creating good leadership.
Anybody who tries to be something to everybody is nobody to anybody.
Money is not an aphrodisiac: the desire it may kindle in a female eye is more for the cash than the carrier.
Nothing is more beautiful than the visiting of memories, EXCEPT, of course, the making of them.
If you have arthritis, calmly say, I was always complaining about the ruts in the road until I realized that the ruts are the road.
To expect life to be tailored to our specifications is to invite frustration.
The man who has done nothing but wait for his ship to come in has already missed the boat.
It is not yours to necessarily finish the task, but neither are you free to take no part in it.
We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them.
For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe.
Adversity comes with instruction in its hand.
Wrinkles are the service stripes of life.
Aging seems to be the only available way to live a longer life.
Not old, just bikini-impaired!
Too early old, too late smart!
There are more people in China who speak English than there are in the U.S.
I am an atheist, thank God!
Love is like war, easy to begin but hard to end.
If your lips would keep from slips, five things to observe with care are: To whom you speak, of whom you speak, and how, and when, and where.
Adversity introduces a man to himself.
I thank God for my handicaps for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God.
Friends are lifelines!
The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.
I am who I am because of the bridges I have crossed.
Sometime helping someone actually harms them because it deprives them of learning their lesson.
A company is judged by the president it keeps.
Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.
Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
No gains without pains.
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
They are able because they think they are able.
There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.
Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles.
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.
Better is the enemy of the good.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are puniished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome, we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the right to do the same.
Common sense is not so common.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
What is reading a book but silent conversation?
You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned 70, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
America – the best poor man’s country in the world.
Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.
Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.
I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each person as he/she sees him/herself; each one as the other sees him/her; and each person as he/she really is.
The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when his son gives to his father, both cry.
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none.
It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is.
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
In youth we learn; in age we understand.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Form follows function.
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
You can live to be a hundred, if you give up all the things that make you want to live to a hundred.
We are full of rhythms . . . our pulse, our gestures, our digestive tracts, the lunar and seasonal cycles.
If all pulled in the same direction, the world would topple over.
People differ: Some object to the dancer, and others to the fan.
He who is greedy is always in want.
Greed lessens what is gathered.
The greedy man is incontent with a whole world set before him.
Greed’s worst point is its ingratitude.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of water.
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
Unbidden guests Are often welcomest when they are gone.
Wickedness never fails of doing justice upon itself; for every guilty person is his own hangman.
Habit is habit, and not to be thrown out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.
Laws are never as effective as habits.
Custom, that unwritten law, by which the people keep even kings in awe.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Gray hair is a sign of age, not of wisdom.
We must all hang together, else we shall hang separately.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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 been opened for us.
The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash.
The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Endurance is patience concentrated.
Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.
When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
He who does not hope to win has already lost.
Lord save us all from … a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes.
A leader is a dealer in hope.
The important thing is not that we can live on hope alone, but that life is not worth living without it.
Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.
When hope is taken away from the people, moral degeneration follows swiftly after.
Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
There is nothing that fear or hope does not make men believe.
No hope, no action.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
Hope is not a dream, but a way of making dreams become reality.
Hope is the last thing to abandon the unhappy.
The miserable have no medicine but hope.
Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
Stars will blossom in the darkness, Violets bloom beneath the snow.
Hope is patience with the lamp lit.
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
I steer my bark with hope in my heart, leaving fear astern.
One should … be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Hope lights the candle instead of cursing the darkness.
The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one.
No night but hath its morn.
Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.
A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see-and hits it.
Exclusion is always dangerous. Inclusion is the only safety if we are to have a peaceful world.
An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls – even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls – without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.
It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
A foreigner is a friend I have yet to meet.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
Men cannot be free in a nation where women are forbidden freedom.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
One faces the future with one’s past.
You may lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
For I, who hold sage Homer’s rule the best, Welcome the coming, speed the going guest.
Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.
Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggie until you can find a rock.
When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence, Charles
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead.
Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance.
The possession of a highly social conscience about large-scale issues is no guarantee whatever of reasonable conduct in private relations.
An acquaintance is a person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.
Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions toward us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.
One kind word can warm three winter months.
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me.
Our true nationality is mankind.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
Wit is far more often a shield than a lance.
He who laughs, lasts.
Never expect to find happiness in the same place you lost it.
Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
For neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible.
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
All friendships of any length are based on a continual, mutual forgiveness; without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.
Avoid membership in a body of persons pledged to only one side of anything.
The deadliest contagion is majority opinion.
Expletives serve opinions well which are not sure enough of themselves to risk expression in restrained language.
The man who feels that he must be hopeful and cheerful to get along ignores the careers of some pretty successful misanthropes.
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
We are lazier in our minds than in our bodies.
It is no rest to be idle.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
The hardest work is to go idle.
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.
An impossibility does not disturb us until its accomplishment shows what fools we were.
The empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full barrel.
There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.
Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.
The greatest wisdom often consists in ignorance.
The trouble ain’t that people are ignorant. It’s that they know so much that ain’t so.
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Basic research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.
Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.
Skin is the largest organ of the human body.
All is fair in love and war.
Once you start asking questions, innocence is gone.
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.
The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination.
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Friends are the family you get to choose for yourself.
The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
We are, in truth, more than a half of what we are by imitation.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
A good imitation is the most perfect originality.
Life is the childhood of our immortality.
Never did Christ utter a single word attesting to a personal resurrection and a life beyond the grave.
You cannot make a crab walk straight.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
You can’t get blood out of a turnip.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Tolerance is a tremendous virtue, but the immediate neighbors of tolerance are apathy and weakness.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
The truly innocent are those who not only are guiltless themselves, but who think others are.
It is better ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
Inspiration and genius – one and the same.
For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.
Instinct is untaught ability.
Instinct is the nose of the mind.
If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.
Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Spend time every day listening to what your muse is trying to tell you.
Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry, documented deductions of the brain.
Nothing reaches the intellect before making its appearance in the senses.
Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.
Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Some pursue happiness, others create it.
How unhappy is he who cannot forgive himself.
The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.
May you have warmth in your igloo, oil in your lamp, and peace in your heart.
To live happily is an inward power of the soul.
Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Perfect happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her nose all the time.
Happiness is not a horse, you cannot harness it.
The needle of our conscience is as good a compass as any.
We women ought to put first things first. Why should we mind if men have their faces on the money, as long as we get our hands on it?
Moderation. Small helpings. Sample a little bit of everything. These are the secrets of happiness and good health.
When you dig another out of their troubles, you find a place to bury your own.
A joy that’s shared is a joy made double.
Unshared joy is an unlighted candle.
You’ll find that as your grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.
No man is more cheated than the selfish man.
The you that you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.
The heart as eyes which the brain knows nothing of.
Grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation — twenty-five years at least — and the anger in both directions dissipates.
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian, and Caribbean history of the United States.
The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.
The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
I do believe there is many a tear in the heart that never reaches the eyes.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness, it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Employment is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered the mother of misery.
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
The really happy man is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
Happy is he who learns to bear what he cannot change.
True happiness consists in making others happy.
A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.
The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.
Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.
We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
Where there is laughter there is always more health than sickness.
Sports help girls and women to perceive their bodies as instruments, not just ornaments.
Make haste slowly.
Haste makes waste.
People hate, as they love, unreasonably.
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
We love without reason, and without reason we hate.
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
To improve your memory, lend people money.
The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.
None so deaf as those that will not hear.
Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.
For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.
He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.
The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister. French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, and an advocate for separation of church and state, 1694-1778)
Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind.
The first wealth is health.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Hell is truth seen too late.
A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Western man has no need of more superiority over nature. . . He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Everyone should keep someone else’s diary.
I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do — the day after.
It is the confession, not the priest that give us absolution.
Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to b faithless and cannot.
The books that the world calls immoral books are books that show the world its own shame.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much.
To know everything about oneself one must know all about others.
The secret of living well and longer is eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure.
Four things belong to a judge to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.
Never of the living can the living judge – too blind the affection, or too fresh the grudge.
The secret of living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure.
Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.
Never of the living can the living judge – too blind the affection, or too fresh the grudge.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Racism is a system, not an event.
In the field of transportation, only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Unity does not mean conformity.
Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.
He laughs best who laughs last.
Law’s history is the history of the moral development of the race.
No matter whether the Constitution follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns.
When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Where law ends, there tyranny begins.
To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
You are remembered for the rules you break.
Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the year.
He who would rule must hear and be deaf, see and be blind.
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
There are two levers for moving men – interest and fear.
A leader is a dealer in hope.
To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
To lead the people, walk behind them.
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles. But today it means getting along with people.
A frightened captain makes a frightened crew.
Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount.
It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
When we think we lead we most are led.
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s hard to get it back in.
Men learn while they teach.
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Travelers from afar can lie with impunity.
Who lies for you will lie against you.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.
A half-truth is a whole lie.
A liar should have a good memory.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in cases involving not very nice people.
Liberty is always dangerous – but it is the safest thing we have.
I understand by ‘freedom of spirit’ something quite definite – the unconditional will to say ‘No’, where it is dangerous to say ‘No’.
The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Give me liberty, or give me death.
Give me the liberty to know, to think, to believe, and to utter freely according to conscience, above all other liberties.
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances – to choose one’s own way.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
When you have robbed a man of everything, he is no longer in your power. He is free again.
We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free.
Equality is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
The trouble with life in the fast lane is that you get to the other end in an awful hurry.
The best way to get praise is to die.
Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play it is free will.
There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.
Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.
Luck serves . . . as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
Luck is a word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.
The champion makes his own luck.
Chance never helps those who do not help themselves.
I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
The lucky fellow is the plucky fellow who has been burning midnight oil and taking defeat after defeat with a smile.
Chance favors those in motion.
A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. But no machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.
It is easier to know mankind in general than man individually.
Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?
Man is a social animal.
Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world.
Men make laws; women make manners.
What once were vices are now manners.
A wise woman will always let her husband have her way.
It destroys one’s nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being.
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Pains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
If thee marries for money, thee surely will earn it.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
A deaf husband and a blind wife are always a happy couple.
Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage; and half shut afterward.
The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
A rich widow weeps with one eye and signals with the other.
Thou shalt not bear witness against thy neighbor.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty.
Our judgements about things vary according to the time left us to live -that we think is left us to live.
It is unjust to claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but the cry from suffering organs.
When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.
Don’t defy the diagnosis, try to defy the verdict.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
As long as men are liable to die and are desirous to live, a physician will be . . . well paid.
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.
There are some remedies worse than the disease.
It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Nature, time, and patience are the three great physicians.
Visits always give pleasure – if not the arrival, the departure.
I never forgive, but I always forget.
Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail.
It is commonly seen by experience that excellent memories do often accompany weak judgments.
Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
That which is bitter to endure may be sweet to remember.
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good thing for the first time.
To want to forget something is to think of it.
To live in hearts we leave behind, Is not to die.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
The right honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
A friend is someone who knows all about you, and loves you just the same.
A woman is like a tea bag – only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.
Flirtation is attention without intention.
Macho does not prove mucho.
Men are what their mothers made them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, U.S. essayist, poet, and philosopher who led the transcendentalist movement, 1803-1882)
There was never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.
How a minority, Reaching majority, Seizing authority, Hates a minority!
I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.
We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
There is probably nothing like living together for blinding people to each other.
The nail that sticks out is hammered down.
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Misfortunes always come in by a door that has been left open for them.
Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above it.
We have all of us sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.
All sins cast long shadows.
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up.
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies.
The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong.
Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
What is the use of running when you are on the wrong road?
Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
It has been . . . said that the mob has many heads, but no brains.
In everything the middle course is best: all things in excess bring trouble to men.
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Interest works night and day in fair weather and in foul. It gnaws at a man’s substance with invisible teeth.
Laws go where dollars please.
Money is not an aphrodisiac: the desire it may kindle in a female eye is more for the cash than the carrier.
Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.
Some people’s money is merited and other people’s is inherited.
There is only one thing for a man to do who is married to a woman who enjoys spending money, and that is to enjoy earning it.
Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
If you like easygoing, monogamous men, stay away from billionaires.
March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one Excepting February alone: Which hath but twenty-eight, in fine, Till leap year gives it twenty-nine.
Sweet April showers Do bring May flowers.
A truth that’s told with bad intent – beats all the lies you can invent.
In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.
The so-called new morality has too often the old immorality condoned.
A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.
Morality is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
Many people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
What is morality but immemorial custom?
Even moderation ought not to be practiced to excess.
When a blind man carries the lame man, both go forward.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
Even moderation ought not to be practiced to excess.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
We are new every day.
Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to get an early start.
A man without a plan for the day is lost before he starts.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Put yourself in competition with yourself each day. Each morning look back upon your work of yesterday and then try to beat it.
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it.
A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.
It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.
Necessity, who is the mother of our invention.
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
One starts an action simply because one must do something.
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
Urgent necessity prompts many to do things.
To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.
I happened on the idea of fitting an engine to a bicycle simply because I did not want to ride crowded trains and buses.
Always in a moment of extreme danger things can be done which had previously been thought impossible.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
What you praise you increase.
When we are listened to . . . ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.
We talk on principle, but we act on interest.
The virtues and the vices are all put in motion by interest.
Some people change their ways when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.
Good resolutions are like babies crying in church. They should be carried out immediately.
This thing that we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.
For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.
No matter how old a mother is, she still watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.
One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love and to long life.
If you can learn from hard knocks, you can also learn from soft touches.
The moment somebody says to me, This is very risky, is the moment it becomes attractive to me.
A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
The passion to get ahead is sometimes born of the fear lest we be left behind.
Beware of trying to accomplish anything by force.
No leader can be too far ahead of his followers.
Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Classical music isn’t the kind that we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
Music is almost a miracle, for it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter.
Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
Music touches places beyond our touching.
The devil does not stay where music is.
Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides!
Chamber music – a conversation among friends.
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean thing.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
We don’t have to agree on anything to be kind to one another.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Nature is not human-hearted.
After a debauch of thundershower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
The unnatural – that too is natural.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences.
We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
The soil, in return for her service, keeps the tree tied to her; the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.
Grass is the forgiveness of nature – her constant benediction. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
When a man wantonly destroys a work of man we call him a vandal; when a man destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can’t help but learn.
Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Earth laughs in flowers.
Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while.
Gardening is landscape painting.
The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.
We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food, and medicine to the soul.
Pleasure for an hour, a bottle of wine. Pleasure for a year, marriage. Pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.
When all else is lost, the future still remains.
Many children, many cares. No children, no felicity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convince Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . no longer exist.
Necessity makes even the timid brave.
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
The best way to uncolor the Negro is to give the white man a white heart.
In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long.
The crop always seems better in our neighbor’s field, and our neighbor’s cow gives more milk.
Neutrality, as a lasting principle, is an evidence of weakness.
A wise neuter joins with neither, but uses both, as his honest interest leads him.
I was never less alone than when by myself.,
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
Never cut what you can untie.
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. ‘Nothing in the paper today,’ we sigh.
A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.
News is the first rough draft of history.
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
jane
Picture yourself placing your problem inside a pale, yellow balloon, letting it go, watching it drift until it is a tiny pastel dot in the sky.
Man is so made that whenever anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared to believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
There are two kinds of people on earth — the people who lift and the people who lean.
We here highly resolve that . . . government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
We conquer by continuing.
By perseverance the snails reached the ark.
If you want your ship to come in, you must build a dock.
The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.
To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
Error is mortal.
Friendships aren’t perfect, and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
The man who makes no mistakes lacks boldness and the spirit of adventure. Never trying anything new, he is a brake on the wheels of progress.
You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.
When men are oppressed, it’s a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it’s tradition.
Friends can be said to fall in like with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Good health is not something we can buy, but it can be an extremely valuable savings account.
I realize that humor isn’t for everyone. It’s only for people who want to have fun, enjoy life, and feel alive.
Fortune sides with him who dares.
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. John Neal, U.S. architect, lawyer, author and art critic, 1793-1876)
A fair exterior is a silent recommendation.
He had but one eye, and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.
The most delightful advantage of being bald – one can hear snowflakes.
Don’t blame the mirror if your face is faulty.
People are like birds – from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.
He that has a great nose thinks everybody is speaking of it.
There’s one thing about baldness – it’s neat.
One’s eyes are what one is, one’s mouth what one becomes.
A man cannot dress, without his ideas getting clothed at the same time.
You don’t marry one person; you marry three: the person you think they are, the person they are, and the person they are going to become as the result of being.
A pessimist is one who feels bad when he feels good for fear he’ll feel worse when he feels better.
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Steal the hog, and give the feet for alms.
I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.
When money is seen as a solution for every problem, money itself becomes the problem.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
A recognition of the conflicts between men, a search for their cause, a condemnation of mere opinion .. . and the discovery of a standard of judgment.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Philosophy is doubt.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
Whence? wither? why? how? – these questions cover all philosophy.
The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.
Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.
When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.
Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
Life is not about significant details, illuminated in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
Every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
The rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.
There is no pleasure without a tincture of bitterness.
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.
Every man is a poet when he is in love.
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
Poetry, the eldest sister of all arts, and parent of most.
Poetry, therefore, we will call ‘Musical Thought.’
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance and the human voice.
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
Science is for those who learn; poetry for those who know.
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.
One man’s meat is another’s poison.
Knowledge is power, but enthusiasm pulls the switch.
Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.
Politeness is the art of choosing among one’s real thoughts.
Popular applause veers with the wind.
If you expect nothing, you’re apt to be surprised. You’ll get it.
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
Think you can, think you can’t; either way, you’ll be right.
It isn’t our position, but our disposition, that makes us happy.
The body manifests what the mind harbors.
Optimism is an intellectual choice.
Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I’m all right so far?
On the human chessboard, all moves are possible.
In the long run, the pessimist may be proved to be right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.
Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Knock the t off the can’t.
The best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.
Happiness is the ability to recognize it.
Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
Some folks think they are thinking when they are only rearranging their prejudices.
True revolutions . . . restore more than they destroy.
They say, You can’t give a smile away; it always comes back. What goes around, comes around.
Life is like a mirror. Smile at it and it smiles back at you.
Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
Hate is like acid. It can damage the vessel in which it is stored as well as destroy the object on which it is poured.
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Charm is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.
Power without [the people’s] confidence is nothing.
However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.
Treat people as if they were what they should be, and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Our self-image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
Getting people to like you is merely the other side of liking them.
Fear to let fall a drop, and you spill a lot.
Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.
One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
There is no miraculous change that takes place in a boy that makes him a man. He becomes a man by being a man.
The quality of our expectations determines the quality of our actions.
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he adores the flag.
The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely, so openly, so unambivalently, is for many children a unique and lasting experience.
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
Poverty – one thing money can’t buy.
The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food.
Poverty is the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.
That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man.
I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient.
Horsepower was a wonderful thing when only horses had it.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Power tends to connect; absolute power connects absolutely.
A Liberal is a power worshipper without power.
The main task of a free society is to civilize the struggle for power.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
Patience and gentleness is power.
Unlimited power corrupts the possessor.
I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.
Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions.
He who has great power should use it lightly.
Aging is about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.
Iron hand in a velvet glove.
Form follows function.
What the people are within, the buildings express without.
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.
A rich man’s joke is always funny.
Praise to the undeserving is severe satire.
The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a ‘but’.
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
As the Greek said, Many men know how to flatter, few men know how to praise.
It is simpler and easier to flatter people than to praise them.
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
What men usually ask of God when they pray is that two and two not make four.
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.
Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first.
Prayer is an end to isolation. It is living our daily life with someone . . . who alone can deliver us from solitude.
Even if no command to pray had existed, our very weakness would have suggested it.
Ordinarily when a man in difficulty turns to prayer, he has already tried every other means of escape.
If you are swept off your feet, it’s time to get on your knees.
The more helpless you are, the better you are fitted to pray, and the more answers to prayer you will experience.
All those football coaches who hold dressing-room prayers before a game should be forced to attend church once a week.
Do not pray by heart, but with the heart.
Prayer requires more of the heart than of the tongue.
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.
O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.
Grant that we may not so much seek to be understood as to understand.
Just pray for a tough hide and a tender heart.
It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods, a man should himself lend a hand.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
Heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act.
Visualize, prayerize, actionize, and your wishes will come true.
Nothing is discussed more and practiced less than prayer.
A prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned heavenward.
When at night you cannot sleep, talk to the Shepherd and stop counting sheep.
Prayer is the key, but faith unlocks the door.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
There are only two ways to be quite unprejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to be completely indifferent.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.
We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility.
Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.
We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.
Of all the injuries inflicted by racism on people of color, the most corrosive is the wound within, the internalized racism that leads some victims . . . to embrace the values of their oppressors.
Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
A fox should not be of the jury at a goose’s trial.
He hears but half who hears one party only.
He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
In fair weather prepare for foul.
The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
Freedom of the press is the staff of life, for any vital democracy.
Pride is the direct appreciation of oneself.
Pride is the mask of one’s own faults.
When a proud man hears another praised, he feels himself injured.
Pride had rather go out of the way than go behind.
Principles become modified in practice by facts.
Important principles may and must be flexible.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
What the devil needs is for good people to remain silent.
Prayer is the world’s greatest wireless connection.
Nothing in life is as exhilarating as to be shot at without results.
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution, it’s that they can’t see the problem.
Every path has its puddle.
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
Every problem contains the seeds of its own solution.
The block of granite, which was an obstacle in the path of the weak, becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.
Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.
Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
There is no movement without our own resistance.
The best way out of a problem is through it.
Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome trying to succeed.
Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
‘Vice-President’ is the title given to a corporate manager instead of a raise.
It’s amazing how important your job is when you want the day off – and how unimportant it is when you want a raise.
Experience is the one thing you have plenty of when you’re too old to get the job.
Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.
People who work sitting down generally get paid more than people who work standing up.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Ask a writer what he thinks about critics and the answer you get is similar to what you get when you ask a lamppost how he feels about dogs.
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
I don’t like the fact that doctors are referred to as practicing.
A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
And from the discontent of man the world’s best progress springs.
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
Once a man would spend a week patiently waiting if he missed a stage coach, but now he rages if he misses the first section of a revolving door.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic, and more time to drive to the office.
What we call progress is the exchange of one Nuisance for another Nuisance.
Occasionally we sigh for an earlier day when we could just look at the stars without worrying whether they were theirs or ours.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.
I shall always consider the best guesser the best prophet.
Prosperity makes some friends and many enemies.
The U.S. has a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.
Undertake not what you cannot perform but be careful to keep your promise.
To have and not to give is often worse than to steal.
To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.
Modest doubt is call’d The beacon of the wise.
The burden of proof lies on the plaintiff.
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.
Mine is better than ours.
There is a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.
People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
Dine on little, and sup on less.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person’s money as his time.
My object is . . . To let the punishment fit the crime.
He that spareth his rod hateth his son.
Many individuals have, like uncut diamonds, shining qualities beneath a rough exterior.
In quarreling the truth is always lost.
It is not every question that deserves an answer.
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
I never said I want to be alone. I only said,I want to be left alone. There is all the difference. Greta Garbp. Swedish-American film actress, 1905-1990)
In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.
My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
When the mouse laughs at the cat there’s a hole nearby.
Fatigue is the best pillow.
The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now, if I was a grave digger, or even a hangman, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.
Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.
All would live long, but none would be old.
Equal opportunity is good, but special privilege even better.
A man of words and not of deeds, Is like a garden full of weeds.
If you can’t bite, don’t show your teeth.
Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
God hath made of one blood all nations of men.
Vexed sailors curse the rain for which poor shepherds prayed in vain.
A rainbow in the morning Is the Shepherd’s warning; But a rainbow at night Is the Shepherd’s delight.
Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body.
He that will have a perfect brother must resign himself to remaining brotherless.
Have a high standard for yourself and a medium one for everyone else.
Hope for a miracle. But don’t depend on one.
If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.
Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
When nobody around you seems to measure up, it’s time to check your yardstick.
Life guarantees a chance—not a fair shake.
The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.
The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all.
The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.
Learn to . . . be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Better is the enemy of the good.
To expect life to be tailored to our specifications is to invite frustration.
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t bring down.
Prospect is often better than possession.
Too many people miss the silver lining because they’re expecting gold.
My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Friendships aren’t perfect, and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
In nature there are neither rewards or punishments—-there are consequences.
You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments; then the wind blows your footprints away.
There is many a boy today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.
Loneliness is the ultimate poverty.
Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.
Facts as facts do not always create a spirit of reality, because reality is a spirit.
All our interior world is reality – and that perhaps more so than our apparent world.
Reason is also choice.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.
All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
Reason can in general do more than blind force.
You must always be open to your luck. You cannot force it, but you can recognize it.
Luck is good planning, carefully executed.
I think that one can have luck if one creates an atmosphere of spontaneity.
Motivation triggers luck.
Luck is largely a matter of paying attention.
Fortune is with you for an hour, and against you for ten!
The hole and the patch should be commensurate.
No doing without some ruing.
Were it not better to forget than to remember and regret?
Should-haves solve nothing. It’s the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.
Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it is good only for wallowing.
Your past is always going to be the way it was. Stop trying to change it.
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people. The hardest is with one.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
The worst hatred is that of relatives.
No man will be respected by others who is despised by his own relatives.
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury; monarchies by poverty.
The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
It is a very delicate job to forgive a man, without lowering him in his estimation, and yours too.
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.
As for future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.
Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
With soap baptism is a good thing.
There’s no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.
If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
I wanted to become an atheist but I gave it up. They have no holidays.
One religion is as true as another.
B.I.B.L.E. = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
I don’t see why religion and science can’t get along. What’s wrong with counting our blessings with a computer?
A good life is the only religion.
When I did well, I heard it never; When I did ill, I heard it ever.
The service we render others is really the rent we pay for our room on Earth.
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian
A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.
For Christian Lent, I gave up my new year’s resolutions.
Morally tainted money is worth less than the value.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Old age is when you know all the answers but nobody asks you the questions.
Revenge is an inhuman word.
When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
Retirement: Twice as much spouse, half as much pay.
Constant togetherness is fine – but only for Siamese twins.
Two weeks is about the ideal length of time to retire.
Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress’d.
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt.
Riots are the voices of the unheard.
All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the roots.
A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
The pleasures of the rich are bought with the tears of the poor.
A man’s true wealth is the good he does in this world.
Resort to ridicule only when reason is against us.
You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live.
Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
No matter where I run, I meet myself there.
The world may take your reputation from you, but it cannot take your character.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
To thine own self be true.
Innovators are inevitably controversial.
Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
Dancing on the edge is the only place to be.
There is simply no way you can grow without taking chances.
He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
Our safety is not in blindness, but in facing our danger.
Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!
He that would have fruit must climb the tree.
You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.
You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
Danger and delight grow on one stalk.
The trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
For of all sad words of tongues or pen the saddest are these: It might have been.
To play it safe is not to play.
No one would have crossed the ocean if he could have gotten off the ship in the storm.
Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.
Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew.
Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don’t know how far we can go.
If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Example has more followers than reason.
One filled with joy preaches without preaching.
Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
It could’ve been.
What some invent the rest enlarge.
It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen.
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
It is better to be safe than sorry.
Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions . . . are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
Sanity is very rare; every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.
What is research, but a blind date with knowledge?
Research is to see what everybody has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.
Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.
Basic research is when I’m doing what I don’t know what I’m doing. Wernher von Braun, German-American aerospace engineer and a pioneer of rocket technology and space science in the U.S., 1912-1977)
The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
If school results were the key to power, girls would be running the world.
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
The World would be a safer place, If someone had a plan: Before exploring Outer Space, To find the Inner Man.
In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Art is I; science is we.
Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out, and minutely articulated.
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.
Madam de Stael pronounced architecture to be frozen music; so is statuary crystalized spirituality.
Praise the sea; on shore remain.
Night is the mother of thoughts.
Spring is a virgin, Summer a mother, Autumn a widow, and Winter a stepmother.
People 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.
What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away.
I know that’s a secret, for It’s whispered everywhere.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking . . . is freedom.
The way to be safe is never to be secure.
It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.
Safety first has been the motto of the human race for half a million years; but it has never been the motto of leaders.
Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.
Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity; they seem more afraid of life than of death.
Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected.
You know it’s time for change when children act like leaders and leaders act like children.
Maturity consists of no longer being taken in by oneself.
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one’s identity.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.
Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.
They are able because they think they are able.
The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.
Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.
Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.
The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or un-indebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
If one is to be ultimately at peace with himself . . . what he can be, he must be.
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
Improvement begins with I.
Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Most of us grow up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of chainmail [armor] that none can pierce.
Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
Start where you are, but don’t stay there.
The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.
Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity.
If arrogance is the heady wine of youth, then humility must be its eternal hangover.
It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball-the further I am rolled, the more I gain.
The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money.
School vouchers are sold as a way for parents to handpick schools that reinforce values taught at home, but democracy requires critical thinkers who are exposed to new ideas.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions,
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
To strengthen whilst one stands. For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather; / To cheer one on the tedious way, / To fetch one if one goes astray, / To lift one if one totters down, /
Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
He who conquers others is strong; he who conquers himself is mighty,
What lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
Anger is only one letter short of danger.
Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.
That is always our problem, not how to get control of people, but how all together we can get control of a situation.
Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.
Self-control involves a minimum information given with maximum politeness.
No man is free who is not master of himself.
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies.
He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.
The measure of power is not based on how many you beat down but how many you lift up.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
What poison is to food, self-pity is to life.
Self-pity is one of the most dangerous forms of self-centeredness. It fogs our vision.
I just want to make sure my life doesn’t end with a whine.
A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.
It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.
He serves his party best who serves the country best.
When foxes guard the henhouses, the hens don’t flourish.
Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.
The wise don’t expect to find life worth living; they make it that way.
It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.
An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.
We’re all in this together . . . alone.
No one can really pull you up very high when you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains.
We need to find the courage to say no to the things and people that are not serving us if we want . . . to live our lives with authenticity.
There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence upon one’s self.
It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.
The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.
Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm.
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Every man paddles his own canoe.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
If it is to be, it is up to me.
I leave before being left. I decide.
If there is no wind, row.
No bird soars too high if he soars on his own wings.
Art is the signature of civilizations.
An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.
Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.
Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
You never go wrong when you take the high road – it’s less crowded up there.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money.
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; Nothing more difficult than understanding him.
Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.
The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
LISTEN and SILENT are spelled with the same letters. Think about it.
Education is the vaccination for prevention of poverty.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Citius, altius, forties – Swifter, higher, stronger.
The game isn’t over until it’s over.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
Slumps in life are like soft beds. They’re easy to get into and hard to get out of.
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
You know you’re getting old when you start watching golf on TV and enjoying it.
Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star! How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky!
These blessed candles of the night.
States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.
Ambassadors are the eye and ear of states.
An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth.
Tell the truth so as to puzzle and confound your adversaries.
I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as ’twas said to me.
What does not destroy me, makes me strong.
If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be no help.
The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.
Fear is stronger than arms.
Soul appears when we make room for it.
Speech is the index of the mind.
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Let no one be willing to speak ill of the absent.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Years wrinkle the face, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
When I use the word spirituality, I don’t necessarily mean religion; I mean whatever it is that helps you feel connected to something that is larger than yourself.
Faith is like electricity. You can’t see it, but you can see the light.
I am one of those who would rather sink with faith than swim without it.
Faith is not knowledge of what the mystery of the universe is, but the conviction that there is a mystery, and that it is greater than us.
War would end if the dead could return.
The only whole heart is a broken one because it lets the light in.
International sport is war without shooting.
Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one.
Sport is one area where no participant is worried about another’s race, religion, or wealth.
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature’s soft nurse.
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
I was never less alone than when by myself.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
One can acquire everything in solitude but character.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
In solitude, when we are least alone.
The strongest man is the one who stands most alone.
Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it hath.
When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions!
The poor and the busy have no leisure for sentimental sorrow.
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert it only irritates.
Sorrow is a fruit; God does not allow it to grow on a branch that is too weak to bear it.
All sorrows are bearable, if there is bread.
There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.
I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee.
There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; Carve every word before you let it fall.
. . . ’tis his at last who says it best.
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers or both.
Winston [Churchill] devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches. F.E. Smith, British politician, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, and close friend of Winston Churchill, 1870-1930)
Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.
Once you get people laughing, they’re listening and you can tell them almost anything.
The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
Many things are lost for want of asking.
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
Get black on white.
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.
It is not alone what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.
So many laws argue so many sins.
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.
With most people, doubt about one thing is simply blind belief in another.
Believe nothing and be on your guard against everything.
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die, Lift not your hands to it for help – for it as impotently moves as you or I.
I am disgrac’d, impeach’d and baffled here, – Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear.
My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours. . . . . We say, A person is a person through other persons.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears.
Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.
Better silent than stupid.
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent.
I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.
It is easier to talk than to hold one’s tongue.
Speech is silver; silence is golden.
Still waters run deep.
Vessels never give so great a sound as when they are empty.
I regret often that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
A speech does not need to be eternal to be immortal.
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.
The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.
Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.
The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
Simple style is like white light. It is complex, but its complexity is not obvious.
The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Simple truths are a relief from grand speculations.
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380 SL convertible.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Sex is the poor man’s polo.
I am always looking for meaningful one-night stands.
The cable TV sex channels don’t expand our horizons, don’t make us better people, and don’t come in clearly enough.
It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
Coming events cast their shadows before.
I count him lost, who is lost to shame.
Ships are but boards, sailors but men.
Him that makes shoes goes barefoot himself.
Prevention is better than cure.
Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
The silent dog is the first to bite.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
Ask God’s blessing on your work, but don’t ask him to do it for you.
God gives every bird its food, but he does not throw it into the nest.
If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.
Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.
I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until . . . we have stopped saying It got lost, and say I lost it.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.
He profits most who serves best.
Sex is an emotion in motion.
Sex is the great amateur art.
Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.
The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Is sex dirty? Only if it is done right.
It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.
Sex at eighty-four is terrific, especially the one in the winter.
Accept every blind date you can get, even with a girl who wears jeans. Maybe you can talk her out of them.
Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.
The wise don’t expect to find life worth living; they make it that way.
It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.
An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.
We’re all in this together . . . alone.
No one can really pull you up very high when you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains.
We need to find the courage to say no to the things and people that are not serving us if we want . . . to live our lives with authenticity.
There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence upon one’s self.
It is easier to live life through someone else than to become complete yourself.
The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.
Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm.
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Every man paddles his own canoe.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
If it is to be, it is up to me.
I leave before being left. I decide.
If there is no wind, row.
No bird soars too high if he soars on his own wings.
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
No power is strong enough to be lasting if it labors under the weight of fear.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Iron sharpens iron; scholar, the scholar.
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.
Style is the dress of thoughts.
Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.
If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.
From a distance it is something, and nearby it is nothing.
He that is afraid to shake the dice will never throw a six.
Many of our fears are tissue paper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
When thinking won’t cure fear, action will.
Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. And lo, no one was there.
Fear is faith that it won’t work out.
Fear is the absence of faith.
I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.
Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.
It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
recovery are both from within.
If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.
What pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies . . . the real man.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past.
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.
Circumstances–what are circumstances? I make circumstances.
Heaven and hell is right now . . . You make it heaven or you make it hell by your actions.
The proverb warns that You should not bite that hand that feeds you. But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Blame yourself if you have no branches or leaves; don’t accuse the sun of partiality.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
The gods help those who help themselves.
