Favourite Quotations

"A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations."
-William Feather, The Treasure of Franchard

"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment."
-Baltasar Gracian, The Oracle

"People only see what they are prepared to see."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
-Albert Camus

"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."
-C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections

"Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else."
-André Gide, The Fruits of the Earth

"I wish they would only take me as I am."
-Vincent Van Gogh, Dear Theo: Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."
-Arabic Parable

"Discretion is being able to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice."
-Anon

"Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold -- but so does a hard-boiled egg."
-Anon

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
-Albert Einstein

"Without a struggle, there can be no progress."
-Frederick Douglass

"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes."
-Henry Kaiser

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant."
-Horace

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
-Thomas Paine

"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem."
-Theodore Rubin

"Advice is like snow -- the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind."
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"All of us, at certain moments of our lives, need to take advice and to receive help from other people."
-Alexis Carrel, Reflections on Life

"I agree with every word you write, and I can prove this in no better way than by taking your advice from beginning to end."
-Ellen Glasgow, Letters of Ellen Glasgow

"No one wants advice -- only corroboration."
-John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

"The whole business of marshaling one's energies becomes more and more important as one grows older."
-Hume Cronyn

"I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work."
-William Ernest Hocking, Wisdom for Our Time

"Years and sins are always more than owned."
-Italian Proverb

"No man is ever old enough to know better."
-Holbrook Jackson, "Ladies' Home Journal", January 1950

"A woman's always younger than a man of equal years."
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Gandhi

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

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken bird that cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes

"If you can imagine it,
You can achieve it.
If you can dream it,
You can become it."
-William Arthur Ward

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
-Anotole France

"You must do the things you think you cannot do."
-Eleanor Roosevelt

"A person who aims at nothing is sure to hit it."
-Anon

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
-David Llyod George

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

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
-Les Brown

"The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become."
-Harold Taylor

"An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition."
-Michael Korda

"When you are on the edge of all things and about to step into the darkness of the unknown,
Faith is knowing one of 2 things will happen; Either there will be something to step on or
You will be given wings to fly."
-Unknown

"He who angers you conquers you."
-Elizabeth Kenny

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."
-Marcus Aurelius

"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."
-George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
-Chinese Proverb

"The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn't angry enough."
-Bede Jarrett, The House of Gold

"One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end."
-William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats Memoirs

"He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own."
-Aesop

"There is someone willing to argue about any point."
-unknown

"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it."
-Jeseph Joubert

"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
-Dave Barry

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute."
-Josh Billings

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."
-Gilbert K. Chestertion

"The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it."
-Ed Howe

"The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you."
-Kin Hubbard

"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me."
-Dudley Field Malone

"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."
-Michel de Montaigne

"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."
-Michel de Montaigne

"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
-John Morley

"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him."
-George Bernard Shaw

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."
-Max Eastman

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
-Michelangelo

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restrains it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
-Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

"Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is."
-Henri Matisse, Notebooks

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Arts

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
-Paul Gauguin

"Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness."
-Percy Wynham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled

"I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific.'"
-Igor Stravinsky, "London Magazine", March 1967

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
-Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student

"Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by."
-John Sales

"Never assume, for it makes an ASS out of U and ME."
-Anon

"You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses."
-Ziggy

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit."
-Helen Keller

"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer."
-Albert Camus

"Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written."
-Anon

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research."
-Anon

"Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come."
-Montesquieu

"The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything."
-Walter Bagehot

"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
-Irvin S. Cobb

"There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one."
-James T. Farrell

"The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book -- it makes a very poor doorstop."
-Alfred Hitchcock

"Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications."
-Fran Lebowitz

"The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it."
-James Bryce

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt."
-Anon

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
-Anon

"The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me."
-Sloan Wilson

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything."
-Alexander Hamilton

"Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed."
-Mark Twain

""The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church."
-Ferdinand Magellan

"It is important that students bring a certain rafamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."
-Jacob Chanowski

"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
-Laurence Peter

"Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn."
-Unknown

"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day."
-Robert Frost

"And while the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department."
-Andrew Carnegie

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
-Maya Angelou

"Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."
-Frank Herbert

"Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."
-Confucius

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living."
-Gail Sheehy

"I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better."
-G. C. Lichtenberg

"To change and to change for the better are two different things."
-German proverb

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-Ghandi

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
-W. Edwards Denning

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."
-Arnold Bennett, "The Arnold Bennett Calendar"

"We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it."

-Mark Twain, Mark Twain at Your Fingertips

"None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives."
-Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
-R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
-Elbert Hubbard

"Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking."
-H. Jackson Browne

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
-Martin Luther King. Jr.

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
-Abraham Lincoln

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
-Helen Keller

"When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character."
-W. Somerset Maugham

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."
-John Holt

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror."
-Ken Keys

"Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it."
-Ellen Frankfort

"I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice."
-Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."
-Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam

"Life is a matter of choice."

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
-Martin Luther King Jr

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."
-Eugene Ionesco

"Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community."
-Anthony J. D'Angelo

"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you."
-Lao-Tzu

"If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that ... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it."
-John Lennon

"Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was."
-Richard L. Evans

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
-Henry David Thoreau

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort."
-Sydney Smith

"Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own."
-John M. Barrie

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."
-Jonathan Kozol

"All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men."
-Hilaire Belloc, The Silence of the Sea

"No doubt there are other important things in life besides conflict, but there are not many other things so inevitably interesting. The very saints interest us most when we think of them as enganged in a conflict with the Devil."
-Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion

"When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him."
-Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student