Right Attitudes

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
* Voltaire

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
* Henry David Thoreau

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.
* Voltaire

Everyone goes to the forest; some go for a walk to be inspired, and others go to cut down the trees.
* Vladimir Horowitz

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us.
* Thomas Browne

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vanity is the foundation of the most ridiculous and contemptible vices—the vices of affectation and common lying.
* George Goodman

Light tomorrow with today.
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The heart always sees before than the head can see.
* Thomas Carlyle

He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong.
* Robert G. Ingersoll

A manager is an assistant to his men.
* Thomas J. Watson

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.
* Pema Chodron

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
* Adlai Stevenson

No sadder proof can be given of a person’s own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.
* Thomas Carlyle

Praise is sometimes a good thing for the diffident and despondent. It teaches them properly to rely on the kindness of others.
* Letitia Elizabeth Landon

You have to believe in yourself when no one else does. That’s what makes you a winner.
* Venus Williams

Somewhere in your make-up there lies sleeping, the seed of achievement which, if aroused and put into action, would carry you to heights, such as you may never have hoped to attain.
* Napoleon Hill

The world is ready to give up its secrets if we only know how to knock, how to give it the necessary blow. The strength and force of the blow come through concentration.
* Swami Vivekananda

Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.
* Eliza Cook

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives—the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.
* Norman Cousins

The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
* Thomas Carlyle

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.
* Adlai Stevenson

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
* Arthur Miller

I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
* Ernest Hemingway

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.
* Napoleon Hill

Things of the spirit differ from things material in that the more you give the more you have.
* Christopher Morley

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
* Mark Twain

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.
* Theodore Roosevelt

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.
* Carl Bernstein

Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you?
* Walt Whitman

What a heavy burden is a name that has become famous too soon.
* Voltaire

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body, to risk his well-being, to risk his life, in a great cause.
* Theodore Roosevelt

If there be no enemy there’s no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown.
* Thomas Carlyle

Changes are not predictable; but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation.
* Gail Sheehy

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
* Thomas Carlyle

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
* Thomas Carlyle

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.
* Theodore Roosevelt

For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.
* Thomas Carlyle

Make sure you never, never argue at night. You just lose a good night’s sleep, and you can’t settle anything until morning anyway.
* Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor-all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked-who is good? Not that men are ignorant-what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
* W. E. B. Du Bois

Life-complication Theory: Given a choice between an easy solution and a complicated one, the loser will usually opt to travel the complicated path. Don’t ignore a solution just because it’s simple.
* Robert Ringer

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.
* Norman Cousins

Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.
* Thomas Browne

Philosophy is a purely personal matter. A genuine philosopher’s credo is the outcome of a single complex personality; it cannot be transferred. No two persons, if sincere, can have the same philosophy.
* Havelock Ellis

Every morning I wake up saying, I’m still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.
* Jacques Cousteau

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
* Victor Hugo

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
* Robert G. Ingersoll

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
* Thomas Carlyle

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
* M. Scott Peck

Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.
* Jean Anouilh

People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you’ve got to keep your feet warm.
* Denis Diderot

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
* Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
* Robert G. Ingersoll

You don’t hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.
* Thomas J. Watson

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
* Christopher Morley

I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little impotent, and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope.
* Voltaire

There is no wisdom like frankness.
* Benjamin Disraeli

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.
* Denis Diderot

There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.
* Isaac Bashevis Singer

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do to ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
* Theodore Roosevelt

Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine.
* Friedrich Schiller

As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need a prosperity of kindness and decency.
* Caroline Kennedy

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.
* E. W. Howe

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.
* Theodore Roosevelt

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.
* Voltaire

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.
* John Foster Dulles

The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
* Voltaire

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
* Robert G. Ingersoll

Most confidence has still most cause to doubt.
* John Dryden

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species.
* Norman Cousins

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.
* Barbara De Angelis

It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.
* Adlai Stevenson

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
* William Faulkner

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
* Denis Diderot

The journey between what you once were and who you are now becoming is where the dance of life really takes place.
* Barbara De Angelis

It is nonsense to say there is not enough time to be fully informed … Time given to thought is the greatest timesaver of all.
* Norman Cousins

Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.
* Giuseppe Mazzini

Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
* Jean-Paul Sartre

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
* Joyce Carol Oates

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
* Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.
* Sam Levenson

When a man has no reason to trust himself, he trusts in luck.
* E. W. Howe

Courage from hearts and not from numbers grows.
* John Dryden

Who can confess his poverty and look it in the face, destroys its sting: but a proud poor man, he is poor, indeed.
* Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.
* Norman Cousins

Example is the best precept.
* Aesop

The job is to ask questions—it always was—and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
* Arthur Miller

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.
* Napoleon Hill

If there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late.
* Philip Roth

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

Days are scrolls: write on them only what you want remembered.
* Bahya ibn Paquda

True affection is a body of enigmas, mysteries and riddles, wherein two so become one that they both become two.
* Thomas Browne

It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.
* Edgar Allan Poe

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.
* W. E. B. Du Bois

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.
* Marianne Williamson

When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.
* William Faulkner

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are, for it shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.
* Thomas Carlyle

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
* Henry David Thoreau

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.
* Winston Churchill

Those that embrace the entire universe with love, for the most part love nothing, but their narrow selves.
* Johann Gottfried Herder

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.
* Thich Nhat Hanh