Right Attitudes

The superior man does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow.
—Confucius

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
—Henri Matisse

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
—Miguel de Unamuno

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
—Henry David Thoreau

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
—Charles de Gaulle

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
—Herbert Spencer

Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.
—Tryon Edwards

Touched by beauty we enter the forefields of enlightenment. Flying higher and higher one may discover that there is nothing else but beauty. Isn’t it a pity that we’re not yet ready to keep it in permanent view?
—Hans Taeger

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
—Oscar Wilde

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
—Edgar Allan Poe

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.
—Wayne Dyer

All art is but imitation of nature.
—Seneca the Elder (Marcus Annaeus Seneca)

Sometimes something worth doing is worth overdoing.
—David Letterman

The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen

Live in my heart and pay no rent.
—Samuel Lover

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
—Henry Kissinger

Example has more followers than reason.—We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.—A generous habit of thought and action carries with it an incalculable influence.
—Christian Nestell Bovee

Too much money is as demoralizing as too little, and there’s no such thing as exactly enough.
—Mignon McLaughlin

Since he has evil desire, does not listen to his own conscience nor pay attention to the doctrine, he will have to face sin and thereby enter the lower plane of existence.
—Buddhist Teaching

Real compassion does not arise from an over-emotional gut blocking the brain, but from a clean clear mind melting into the heart.
—Hans Taeger

To die will be an awfully big adventure.
—J. M. Barrie

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
—G. K. Chesterton

Do your best every day and your life will gradually expand into satisfying fullness.
—Horatio Dresser

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.
—George Bernard Shaw

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the “higher life.”
—Aldous Huxley

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A fool, misled by his own folly, is often burnt by his own anger because of his showing off with malicious intention.
—Buddhist Teaching

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in company, cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion; all his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation occasions for the introduction of what he has to say. The favorites of society are able men, and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and contenting.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
—George Bernard Shaw

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.
—Agatha Christie

Men lose their tempers in defending their taste.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
—Roland Barthes

The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.
—Winston Churchill

The better part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.
—Martha Graham

Leaders keep their eyes on the horizon, not just on the bottom line.
—Warren Bennis

The one prudence of life is concentration.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.
—Martin Luther

There are twallied powers in man; knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is so much of the truth seen in a distorted medium as the mind arrives at by groping, wisdom what the eye of divine vision sees in the spirit.
—Sri Aurobindo

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test: though a different opinion prevails in this country.
—Mary Wollstonecraft

Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place.
—Moliere

A leader who doesn?t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.
—Golda Meir

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.
—John Locke

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
—Booker T. Washington

The greatest things are accomplished by individual people, not by committees or companies.
—Alfred A. Montapert

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
—Buddhist Teaching

Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
—W. Somerset Maugham

Our religion is itself profoundly sad—a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man’s own language—so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
—Charles Baudelaire

Honor is like an island, rugged and without a landing-place; we can nevermore re-enter when we are once outside of it.
—Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
—John Mason Brown

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

Life marks us all down, so it’s just as well that we start out by overpricing ourselves.
—Mignon McLaughlin

It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.
—Elbert Hubbard

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
—William Dean Howells

Remember, you can earn more money, but when time is spent is gone forever.
—Zig Ziglar

Our ideals are our better selves.
—Amos Bronson Alcott

In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking of a tightrope.
—Henri Matisse

Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the top of a mountain? So are many things learned in adversity which the prosperous man dreams not of?
—Charles Spurgeon

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
—Clarence Darrow

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing him.
—Edmund Burke

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.
—Elbert Hubbard

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

If you must make a mistake, make a new one each time.
—Dale Carnegie

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.
—Napoleon I

Great designs are not accomplished without enthusiasm of some sort.—It is the inspiration of everything great.—Without it no man is to be feared, and with it none despised.
—Christian Nestell Bovee

Nothing is difficult, it is only we who are indolent.
—Benjamin Haydon

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
—Galileo Galilei

The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness; her estate is like that of the things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
—Michel de Montaigne

When a man has done all he can do, still there is a mighty, mysterious agency over which he needs influence to secure success. The only way he can reach it is by prayer.
—Russell Conwell

In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.
—Arthur Helps

Better little prayer with devotion than much without devotion.
—The Talmud

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
—J. B. S. Haldane

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
—Henry Kissinger

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.
—Charles J. Givens

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.
—Albert Einstein

The vices we scoff at in others, laugh at us within ourselves.
—Thomas Browne

There’s no need to hang about waiting for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
—Albert Camus

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
—Charles Spurgeon

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer.
—Katharine Hepburn

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
—Arnold Bennett

Life is a great bundle of little things.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
—John F. Kennedy

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

The morning, pouring everywhere, its golden glory on the air.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
—William Ralph Inge

I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.
—Zig Ziglar

Don’t be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don’t follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it’s enough.
—Charles F. Kettering

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.
—Theodore Roosevelt

People have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.
—Marcel Proust

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.
—Winston Churchill

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.
—Lucille Ball

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
—Andy Warhol

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
—Igor Stravinsky

It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?
—Ronald Reagan

Who put up that cage? Who hung it up with bars, doors? Why do those on the inside want to get out? Why do those outside want to get in? What is this crying inside and out all the time? What is this endless, useless beating of baffled wings at these bars, doors, this cage?
—Carl Sandburg

Youth is wasted on the young.
—George Bernard Shaw

In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings.
—Wilhelm Stekel

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
—Tennessee Williams

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
—Henri Nouwen

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
—John W. Gardner

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That?s the essence of inhumanity.
—George Bernard Shaw

Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself.
—William Shakespeare

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt

No man is happy who does not think himself so.
—Publilius Syrus

The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also?his mind once a year it’s errors, his heart once a year it’s useless passions.
—James Lane Allen

A traveler of taste will notice that the wise are polite all over the world, but the fool only at home.
—Oliver Goldsmith

A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)