Right Attitudes

Nothing is desperately important and the joy of life is just looking at it.
—Alec Guinness (English Actor)

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
—Frank Deford (American Sportswriter)

Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things—with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.
—Corazon Aquino (Filipino Stateswoman)

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
—Janet Frame (New Zealand writer)

We must not seek happiness in peace, but in conflict.
—Paul Claudel (French Author, Dramatist)

I can see that you have a complex problem: it has a real and an imaginary part.
—John Tukey (American Statistician)

Stick with your own perception of yourself—living in your own world—and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.
—John Eliot (American Psychologist)

There must be more to life than having everything.
—Maurice Sendak (American Writer, Illustrator)

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple.
—Doris Janzen Longacre (American Author)

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart, somewhere or other.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

If you spend life trying to be good at everything you will never be great at anything.
—Tom Rath (American Consultant)

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
—Ruth Graham (American Christian Author)

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
—Jose Saramago (Portuguese Novelist)

A successful person realizes his personal responsibility for self-motivation. He starts with himself because he possesses the key to his own ignition switch.
—Kemmons Wilson (American Entrepreneur)

Doubt is brother devil to despair.
—John Boyle O’Reilly (Irish-American Journalist)

Knowledge begets knowledge. The more I see, the more impressed I am—not with what we know—but with how tremendous the areas are as yet unexplored.
—John Glenn (American Astronaut)

Fashion should not be expected to serve in the stead of courage or character.
—Loretta Young (American Actress)

Envy is like a fly that passes all a body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.
—George Chapman (English Poet, Playwright)

This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the truth, and the truth is the cure. . . . A sick man is like a criminal cast into prison for disobeying some law that man has set up. I plead his case, and if I get the verdict, the criminal is set at liberty. If I fail, I lose the case. His own judgment is his judge, his feelings are his evidence. If my explanation is satisfactory to the judge, you will give me the verdict. This ends the trial, and the patient is released.
—Phineas Quimby

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.
—Enoch Powell (British Politician)

A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—John Burroughs (American Naturalist, Writer)

No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
—Liberty Hyde Bailey (American Botanist)

There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.
—Soichiro Honda (Japanese Inventor)

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates (American Novelist)

I shall not let a sorrow die until I find the heart of it, nor let a wordless joy go by until it talks to me a bit.
—Sara Teasdale (American Poet)

People come to Washington believing it’s the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to the engine.
—Richard N. Goodwin (American Writer)

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
—Queen Elizabeth I (British Monarch)

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Each person is an idiom… an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
—Gordon Allport (American Psychologist)

Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)

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)