Right Attitudes

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
—Patricia Neal (American Actress)

Most of us are honest all the time, and all of us are honest most of the time.
—Charles Mathias (American Politician)

How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement—no matter how temporary.
—Craig Thompson (American Artist)

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. … When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
—Khaled Hosseini (Afghan-American Author)

In our dreams we are always young.
—Sarah Louise Delany (American Educator, Author)

The people that set one animal against another haven’t the guts to be bullies themselves. They’re just secondhand cowards.
—Cleveland Amory (American Animal Rights Activist)

Failure is often God’s own tool for carving some of the finest outlines in the character of his children; and, even in this life, bitter and crushing failures have often in them the germs of new and quite unimagined happiness.
—Thomas Hodgkin (English Physician)

Whoever says he knows that immortality is a fact is merely hoping that it is.
—Carl Clinton Van Doren (American Critic, Historian)

I don’t know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do.
—Alain-Rene Lesage (French Novelist, Dramatist)

A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents.
—Herbert Hoover (American Statesman)

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.
—Ted Kennedy (American Politician)

If a door slams shut it means that God is pointing to an open door further on down.
—Anna Delaney Peale (American Author)

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Playwright)

Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.
—Socrates (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.
—Doris Kearns Goodwin (American Historian)

We can easily manage, if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed for it.—But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow to the weight before we are required to bear it.
—John Newton (English Clergyman, Writer)

They made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
—Frank Herbert (American Science-fiction Writer)

And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After death has stopped the ears.
—A. E. Housman (English Scholar, Poet)

A scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than another scientist’s definitions.
—Murray Gell-Mann (American Physicist)

Man is born good by nature, only to later become a beast because of the Society.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
—Joko Beck (American Zen Teacher)

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
—Paul Hawken (American Environmentalist)

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.
—Robert Anton Wilson (American Polymath)

In the democratic western countries, so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of “freedom,” like a bastard brother of reform.
—Wyndham Lewis (British Artist, Writer)

Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.
—Alice Stone Blackwell (American Suffragist)

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
—Czeslaw Milosz (Polish-American Poet, Novelist)

Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, … It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.
—Jodi Picoult (American Novelist)

I believe fundamental honesty is the keystone of business.
—Harvey Samuel Firestone (American Industrialist)

All the wars of the world, all the Caesars, have not the staying power of a lily in a cottage garden.
—Reginald Farrer (English Botanist)

The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (German Philosopher)

For out of the eyes of every stranger looks either a friend or an enemy, waiting to be known.
—Owen Wister (American Novelist)

The buyer needs a hundred eyes; the seller but one.
—Italian Proverb

Good is the enemy of great. That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.
—Jim Collins (American Management Consultant)

It is the things we are unaware of in ourselves which make us so very angry when we see them in other people.
—Irene Claremont de Castillejo (British Psychoanalyst)

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
—Lloyd Alexander (American Writer)

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts, he does not hide; he exposes himself.
—Jeanne Moreau (French Actress)

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher, Mathematician)

Our conscience, which is a great ledger book, wherein are written all our offenses…grinds our souls with the remembrance of some precedent sins, makes us reflect upon, accuse and condemn ourselves.
—Robert Burton (English Scholar, Clergyman)

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.
—Jane Addams (American Social Reformer)

Be advised what thou dost discourse of, and what thou maintainest whether touching religion, state, or vanity; for if thou err in the first, thou shalt be accounted profane; if in the second, dangerous; if in the third, indiscreet and foolish.
—Walter Raleigh (English Explorer, Courtier)

Nature is the art of God.
—Thomas Browne (English Author, Physician)

I think in our own heads we’re never all that confident. I’m not.
—Tom Wilson (American Cartoonist)

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.
—Edwin Percy Whipple (American Literary Critic)

The past is always tense, the future perfect.
—Zadie Smith (English Novelist, Essayist)

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
—Wendell Berry (American Author, Environmentalist)

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable…the art of the next best.
—Otto von Bismarck (Prusso-German Statesman)

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
—Octavio Paz (Mexican Poet, Diplomat)

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
—Philip Pullman (English Children’s Author, Dramatist)

The big problem is not the haves and the have-nots—it’s the give-nots.
—Arnold Glasow (American Businessman)

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
—Henry Miller (American Novelist)

Nature yields her most profound secrets to the person who is determined to uncover them.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)

The myths have always condemned those who “looked back.” Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.
—Dag Hammarskjold (Swedish Statesman)

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
—Werner Herzog (German Film Director)

Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.
—Bhagat Singh (Indian Revolutionary)