Right Attitudes

If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.
* Tom Peters

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.
* Mel Brooks

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
* Sheridan Le Fanu

There’s much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.
* Diana Trilling

Contemplate the wonders of creation, the Divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from a distance, but as the reality in which you live.
* Abraham Isaac Kook

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
* Tallulah Bankhead

To know that which lies before us in daily life is the prime wisdom.
* John Milton

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance.
* Saul Bellow

If things are not going well with you, begin your effort at correcting the situation by carefully examining the service you are rendering, and especially the spirit in which you are rendering it.
* Roger Babson

Inconsistency with ourselves is the great weakness of human nature.
* Joseph Addison

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make … your life bearable.
* Francine du Plessix Gray

Love what you do. Believe in your instincts. And you’d better be able to pick yourself up and brush yourself off every day.
* Mario Andretti

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.
* Mohandas K. Gandhi

Good sense and good nature are never separated; and good nature is the product of right reason.
* John Dryden

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
* Marcel Proust

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
* Shakti Gawain

When work is a pleasure, life is a joy. When work is duty, life is slavery.
* Maxim Gorky

Stripped of all their masquerades, the fears of men are quite identical: the fear of loneliness, rejection, inferiority, unmanageable anger, illness and death.
* Joshua L. Liebman

Bad behavior and irrational decisions are almost always caused by fear. If you want to change the behavior, address the fear.
* Seth Godin

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
* Erich Fromm

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.
* Joseph Addison

Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgment will always be in demand under all conditions.
* Roger Babson

A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.
* Saint Peter

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
* Voltaire

Boredom is the most horrible of wolves.
* Jean Giono

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
* E. F. Schumacher

Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.
* Marie Chapian

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet and Doctor Merryman.
* Jonathan Swift

Those who do not complain are never pitied.
* Jane Austen

Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.
* Scott Adams

Life is a battle in which we fall from wounds we receive in running away.
* William Laurence Sullivan

Great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed.
* Vincent van Gogh

The end of all wisdom is love, love, love.
* Ramana Maharshi

Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.
* Vincent van Gogh

The covetous man never has money; the prodigal will have none shortly.
* Ben Jonson

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
* Jane Austen

Heaven and hell is right now … You make it heaven or you make it hell by your actions.
* George Harrison

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
* William S. Burroughs

Love that cares, listens.
* Paul Tillich

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
* Werner Heisenberg

People who are always taking care of their health are like misers who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.
* Laurence Sterne

Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
* Amos Bronson Alcott

We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.
* Thomas Merton

The prudence of the best heads is often defeated by the tenderness of the best of hearts.
* Henry Fielding

We must try not to sink beneath our anguish… but battle on.
* J. K. Rowling

The mind grows narrow in proportion as the soul grows corrupt.
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What is there in man so worthy of honor and reverence as this, that he is capable of contemplating something higher than his own reason, more sublime than the whole universe — that Spirit which alone is self-subsistent, from which all truth proceeds, without which there is no truth?
* Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it.
* Immanuel Hermann Fichte

Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
* Shakti Gawain

Wherever a man turns he can find someone who needs him.
* Albert Schweitzer

Criticize by creating.
* Michelangelo

You know you’re in love when you don’t want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
* Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr. Seuss’)

Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something. You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When a whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.
* Mohandas K. Gandhi

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.
* H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
* Voltaire

The more you speak of yourself, the more likely you are to lie.
* Johann Jacob Zimmermann

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
* Saul Bellow

One-half of life is luck; the other half is discipline – and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.
* Carl Zuckmayer

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
* E. M. Forster

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
* Laurence Sterne

Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
* Eddie Rickenbacker

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.
* Erich Fromm

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.
* Albert Einstein

He turns not back who is bound to a star.
* Leonardo da Vinci

We protract the career of time by employment, we lengthen the duration of our lives by wise thoughts and useful actions. Life to him who wishes not to have lived in vain is thought and action.
* Johann Jacob Zimmermann

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
* Omar Bradley

Make it a practice to judge persons and things in the most favorable light at all times and under all circumstances.
* Vincent de Paul

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
* John Stuart Mill

I hope to work, support my children and die quietly without pain.
* Sean Connery

The only way to earn what you’re really worth is to get paid based on your results.
* T. Harv Eker

We should not mourn for men of high ideals. Rather we should rejoice that we had the privilege of having had them with us, to inspire us by their radiant personalities.
* Indira Gandhi

Self-understanding rather than self- condemnation is the way to inner peace and mature conscience.
* Joshua L. Liebman

Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind.
* Joseph Addison

We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.
* Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.
* Sarah Orne Jewett

It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.
* Ray Bradbury

Come, let us give a little time to folly … and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.
* Bonaventure

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
* R. G. Collingwood

If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend.
* Joseph Addison

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
* Virginia Woolf

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
* Danny Kaye

Only mothers can think of the future, because they give birth to it in their children.
* Maxim Gorky

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.
* Doris Lessing

Anything that consoles is fake.
* Iris Murdoch

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
* Hector Berlioz

The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.
* Eddie Rickenbacker

Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
* Victor Hugo

Who sows virtue reaps honor.
* Leonardo da Vinci

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
* Michelangelo

Men, whose trade is rat-catching, love to catch rats; the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; and the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice.
* Sydney Smith

Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool as his master.
* Ben Jonson

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
* William S. Burroughs

Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. You’ll be afraid you can’t achieve it … It’s your excuse to yourself for Snot doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.
* Laurence Olivier