Right Attitudes

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
* Niccolo Machiavelli

Out of difficulties grow miracles.
* Jean de La Bruyere

Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.
* B. C. Forbes

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
* John Lennon

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.
* Gloria Steinem

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.
* John Locke

Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality. And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.
* Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron)

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
* Henry Adams

No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson

No padlock, bolts, or bars can secure a maiden so well as her own reserve.
* Miguel de Cervantes

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
* P. T. Barnum

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
* Gloria Steinem

There are people who laugh to show their fine teeth; and there are those who cry to show their good hearts.
* Philibert Joseph Roux

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.
* Miguel de Cervantes

We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.
* Sandra Day O’Connor

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
* Pearl S. Buck

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can’t.
* Clarence Darrow

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.
* Franz Kafka

Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care, for speech is but the dialer of thoughts, and every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts.
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
* Harriet Beecher Stowe

By the street of by-and-by, one arrives at the house of never.
* Miguel de Cervantes

All men are liable to error, and most men are … by passion or interest, under temptation to it.
* John Locke

Everybody starts at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment, however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.
* Helen Hayes

I count life just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.
* Robert Browning

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
* Frank Lloyd Wright

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Sir, money, money, the most charming of all things: money, which will say more in one moment than the most elegant lover can in years. Perhaps you will say a man is not young; I answer he is rich. He is not genteel, handsome, witty, brave, good-humored, but he is rich, rich, rich, rich, rich—that one word contradicts everything you can say against him.
* Henry Fielding

You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.
* William Ewart Gladstone

It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.
* Henry Fielding

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
* C. S. Lewis

Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it which will give you fresh courage and you will understand that prayer is an education.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
* Gore Vidal

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence—beginning with one’s own.
* Henry Adams

Let us not envy some men their accumulated riches; their burden would be too heavy for us; we could not sacrifice, as they do, health, quiet, honor, and conscience, to obtain them: it is to pay so dear for them that the bargain is a loss.
* Jean de La Bruyere

Make no small plans for they have no power to stir the soul.
* Niccolo Machiavelli

Real riches are the riches possessed inside.
* B. C. Forbes

In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike.
* Harriet Beecher Stowe

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
* Steven Spielberg

He who has not faith in others shall find no faith in them.
* Laozi

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
* Charles Baudelaire

To make the world a friendly place, one must show it a friendly face.
* James Whitcomb Riley

Ceremony is necessary as the outwork and defense of manners.
* Earl of Chesterfield

The good old days were never that good, believe me. The good new days are today, and better days are coming tomorrow. Our greatest songs are still unsung.
* Hubert Humphrey

The most essential factor is persistence—the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
* James Whitcomb Riley

Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.
* Lawrence Durrell

The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
* Heywood Hale Broun

Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.
* B. C. Forbes

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.
* Colin Powell

Necessity is often the spur to genius.
* Honore de Balzac

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
* Jimmy Carter

Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
* Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
* Franz Kafka

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.
* J. P. Morgan

Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
* Edward Gibbon

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.
* William Temple

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
* Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
* Pearl S. Buck

Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
* Sydney J. Harris

He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported with the latter.
* Henry Fielding

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home,” why should we not look forward to the arrival?
* C. S. Lewis

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.
* Laozi

If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.
* John Henry Newman

As riches and favor forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool but nobody could find it out in his prosperity.
* Jean de La Bruyere

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
* John Muir

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
* Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you constantly think of illness, you eventually become ill; if you believe yourself to be beautiful, you become so.
* Shakti Gawain

For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent man works with perseverance.
* Laozi

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Books and proverbs receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.
* William Temple

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
* Pearl S. Buck

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
* Henry James

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
* John Lennon

In soloing—as in other activities—it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.
* Amelia Earhart

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
* Henry Adams

I’ve been called many things, but never an intellectual.
* Tallulah Bankhead

He who knows he has enough is rich.
* Laozi

Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.
* Jeremy Collier

All fortune belongs to him who has a contented mind.
* Panchatantra

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
* Lillian Hellman

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.
* Jean de La Bruyere

To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
* Sun Tzu

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
* Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Ability is of little account without opportunity.
* Lucille Ball

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women’s lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
* Margaret Mead

The past is the best prophet of the future.
* Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron)

All things are possible until they are proved impossible—and even the impossible may only be so as of now.
* Pearl S. Buck

I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.
* Lawrence Durrell

Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
* Ken Blanchard

When unhappy, one doubts everything; when happy, one doubts nothing.
* Philibert Joseph Roux

If your prayer is selfish, the answer will be something that will rebuke your selfishness. You may not recognize it as having come at all, but it is sure to be there.
* William Temple

Look back, and smile at perils past.
* Walter Scott

I never wanted to see anybody die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure.
* Clarence Darrow

I hate to lose more than I love to win.
* Jimmy Connors

For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until, by and by, out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
* Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
* Philip Roth

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
* Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.
* John Henry Newman

Adversity is, to me at least, a tonic and a bracer.
* Walter Scott

The one sure way to conciliate a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
* Konrad Adenauer

Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.
* Richard Branson

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
* Philip Roth