Right Attitudes

I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.
—Douglas MacArthur (American Military Leader)

It is necessary to try to pass one’s self always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.
—Christina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish Monarch)

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

Happiness radiates like the fragrance from a flower, and draws all good things toward you. Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others. Do not strain after the needs of life. It is sufficient to be quietly alert and aware of them. In this way life proceeds more naturally and effortlessly. Life is here to Enjoy!
—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (Indian Hindu Religious Leader)

When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
—Frank Sinatra (American Singer)

Man, a dunce uncouth, errs in age and youth: babies know the truth.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne (English Poet)

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher)

It’s not within anyone’s power to save the world, but it is within your power to add whatever you can with a loving and caring and peaceful heart.
—Jack Kornfield (American Buddhist Teacher, Author)

The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.
—Karl Popper (Austrian-born British Philosopher)

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.
—Leo Burnett (American Journalist)

In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.
—Andrew Grove (Hungarian-born American Businessperson)

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
—Anthony de Mello (Indian-born American Theologian)

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.
—George Brossin Mere (French Intellectual, Author)

Adversity not only draws people together, but brings forth that beautiful inward friendship.
—Soren Kierkegaard (Danish Philosopher, Theologian)

The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.
—Samuel Johnson (British Essayist)

Marriage is a wonderful institution… but who wants to live in an institution?
—Groucho Marx (American Actor)

Trying to grow up is hurting, you know. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don’t, it hurts even more.
—Aretha Franklin (American Gospel And Soul Singer)

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
—Aldous Huxley (English Humanist)

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.
—Thomas Paine (American Nationalist)

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?…if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

I did envisage being this successful as a player, but not all the hysteria around it off the golf course.
—Tiger Woods (American Sportsperson)

Whatever comes out of despair cannot bear the title of valor, which should be lifted up to such a height, that holding all things under itself, it should be able to maintain its greatness, even in the midst of miseries.
—Philip Sidney (English Soldier, Poet, Courtier)

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!
—Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist)

Sometimes we laugh because a joke is funny. Sometimes we laugh to show we’re smart enough to understand the joke in question.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

Then what makes a beautiful human being? Isn’t it the presence of human excellence? Young friend, if you wish to be beautiful, then work diligently at human excellence. And what is that? Observe those whom you praise without prejudice. The just or the unjust? The just. The even-tempered or the undisciplined? The even-tempered. The self-controlled or the uncontrolled? The self-controlled. In making yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful—but to the extent you ignore these qualities, you’ll be ugly, even if you use every trick in the book to appear beautiful.
—Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

All the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit—the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history.
—Rabindranath Tagore (Indian Hindu Polymath)

There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hour-glass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly-bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.
—Lady Bird Johnson (American Entrepreneur)

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.
—Alexander Graham Bell (Scottish-born American Inventor)

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
—William James (American Philosopher)

A company has a responsibility beyond making a profit for stockholders; it has a responsibility to recognize the dignity of its employees as human beings, to the well-being of its customers, and to the community at large.
—David Packard (American Businessperson)

We are not the masters. The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people…What the electorate gives, the electorate can take away.
—Tony Blair (British Statesman)

Rather throw away that which is dearest to you, your own life, than turn away a good friend.
—Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

Do not appease thy fellow in his hour of anger; do not comfort him while the dead is still laid out before him; do not question him in the hour of his vow; and do not strive to see him in his hour of misfortune.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

I like nonsense—it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope… and that enables you to laugh at all of life’s realities.
—Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’) (American Children’s Books Writer)

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
—Vladimir Nabokov (Russian-born American Novelist)

With maturity comes the wish to economize—to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.
—Bela Bartok (Hungarian Composer, Ethnomusicologist)

He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to knowledge.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

Don’t look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don’t think with your head, think with your hands.
—Taiichi Ohno (Japanese Manufacturing Engineer)

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel (American Jewish Rabbi)

The most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
—Henry Kissinger (American Diplomat)

It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Always so act that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings.
—Immanuel Kant (Prussian German Philosopher)

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
—John Berger (English Art Critic, Essayist, Novelist)

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
—Herman Melville (American Novelist)

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
—Martial (Ancient Roman Latin Poet)

With just enough of learning to misquote.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)

Our only true course is to let the motive for action be in the action itself, never in its reward; not to be incited by the hope of the result, nor yet indulge a propensity for inertness.
—Helena Blavatsky (Ukrainian-born American Theosophist)

There are two different states of human existence: first, to live without thinking of death; second, to live with the thought that you approach death with every hour of your life.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well.
—Charlotte Bronte (English Novelist, Poet)

People who study psychology and the pitfalls of the human mind are no less prone to making errors of judgement and cognition than people who don’t know anything about it.
—Jason Zweig (American Personal Finance Columnist)

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
—Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days, that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!
—Charles Dickens (English Novelist)

A road might end at a single house, but it’s not love’s road. Love is a river. Drink from it.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (Persian Muslim Mystic)

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty.
—Friedrich Schiller (German Poet)

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa (American Rock Guitarist, Singer, Composer)

Incentives are spurs that goad a man to do what he doesn’t particularly like, to get something he does particularly want. They are rewards he voluntarily strives for.
—Paul G. Hoffman (American Businessperson)

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among men the greatest asset I possess. The way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.
—Charles M. Schwab (American Businessperson)

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.
—Calvin Coolidge (American Head of State)

People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher)

To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.
—Augustine of Hippo (Roman-African Christian Philosopher)

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
—Buckminster Fuller (American Inventor, Philosopher)

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
—Richard Feynman (American Physicist)

Everything in moderation, including moderation.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)

Quit what you suck at.
—Brad Feld (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes—or it prospers; and anon, like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, lighting a little hour or two—is gone.
—Omar Khayyam (Persian Mathematician)

Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you are riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind.
—Bob Marley (Jamaican Musician)

When we have passed beyond willings, then we shall have Power. Effort was the helper; Effort is the bar.
—Sri Aurobindo (Indian Yogi, Nationalist)

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a family all wrapped up in each other.
—Burton Hillis (William E. Vaughan) (American Columnist)

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.
—Bertolt Brecht (German Poet)

There is a great deal of human nature in man.
—Charles Kingsley (English Clergyman)

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery (French Novelist, Aviator)

Concentrate on finding your goal, then concentrate on reaching it.
—Michael Friedsam (American Philanthropist)

There is no power like that of true oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day.
—Henry Clay (American Politician)

There is a strong correlation between knowledge and humility. The best investors realize how little they know.
—Morgan Housel (American Financial Journalist, Investor)

OPTIMISM: A kind of heart stimulant—the digitalis of failure.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

There is a Light before which all other light is darkness. There is a Strength before which all other strength is weakness. There is a Joy before which all other joy is suffering.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
—George Orwell (English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist)

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
—Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Essayist, Social Critic)

It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place.
—N. R. Narayana Murthy (Indian Businessperson)

I’ll fight tooth and nail to make something succeed. But the moment I realize it’s not going to succeed, the next day, I will have forgotten about it. I will just move on to the next venture.
—Richard Branson (British Entrepreneur)

The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so.
—David Hume (Scottish Philosopher, Historian)

There is no advancement to him who stands trembling because he cannot see the end from the beginning.
—E. J. Klemme (American Educator)

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)

A president’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.
—Lyndon B. Johnson (American Head of State)

Our human compassion binds us to one another—not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.
—Nelson Mandela (South African Political leader)

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
—Ray Kroc (American Entrepreneur)

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

I would rather hear the pleased laugh of a child over some feature of my exhibition than receive as I did the flattering compliments of the Prince of Wales.
—P. T. Barnum (American Businessperson)

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.
—Katharine Hepburn (American Actor)

Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
—Louisa May Alcott (American Novelist)

It’s no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (British Short Story Writer)

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
—Niels Bohr (Danish Physicist)

The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.
—Philip H. Knight (American Businessman)

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.
—Emily Bronte (English Novelist, Poet)

It’s not what we’re against which defines us, it’s what we stand for. Sometimes the footing is surest where the fewest walk.
—Bob Goff (American Philanthropist)

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one’s talent, and one’s inner happiness.
—George Sand (French Novelist, Dramatist)

For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything.
—Martin Luther (German Protestant Theologian)

Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.
—John Dewey (American Philosopher)

Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell him.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (American Physician)

Friends are proved by adversity.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. A well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.
—Marie Curie (Polish-born French Physicist)

O sacred hunger of ambitious minds!
—Edmund Spenser (English Poet)

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
—Archibald MacLeish (American Poet, Dramatist)

The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts in the hour of danger.
—Andrew Jackson (American Head of State)

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.
—John Wesley (British Methodist Religious Leader)

A king is always a king—and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse.
—Mary Shelley (English Novelist)

Don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
—Steve Jobs (American Entrepreneur)

The greatest thing is, at any moment, to be willing to give up who we are in order to become all that we can be.
—Max De Pree (American Businessman)

A single word often betrays a great design.
—Jean Racine (French Dramatist)

So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.
—Boethius (Roman Statesman, Philosopher)

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much.
—Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (British Anglican Author)

We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
—T. S. Eliot (American-born British Poet)

Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)