Right Attitudes

If you have tried to do something and failed, you are vastly better off than if you had tried to do nothing and succeeded. You must never regret what might have been. The past that did not happen is as hidden from us as the future we cannot see.
—Richard Martin Stern (American Mystery Author)

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
—Philibert Joseph Roux (French Surgeon)

Money is plentiful for those who understand the simple laws which govern its acquisition.
—George Samuel Clason (American Businessperson)

Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or help you sleep at night.
—Marian Wright Edelman (American Civil Regrets Advocate)

Love should be a vehicle allowed to travel without limitations.
—Marvin J. Ashton (American Mormon Religious Leader)

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular.
—Edward R. Murrow (American Journalist)

In the end it is about what you want to be, not what you want to have.
—Derek Sivers (American Entrepreneur)

Who are wise in love, love most, say least.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)

Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires – disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
—Bernie S. Siegel (American Physician, Writer)

The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.
—Dorothy Thompson (American Journalist)

I don’t need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.
—Shirley MacLaine (American Actor)

If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth we must still march on.
—Stopford Brooke (Irish Clergyman, Writer)

One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome.
—Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese Diarist, Novelist)

I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts—spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back—length of life.
—Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (American Philanthropist)

Genius is not essential to good preaching, but a live man is.
—Austin Phelps (American Presbyterian Clergyman)

Nothing grows well in the shade of a big tree.
—Constantin Brancusi (Romanian-French Sculptor)

There is nothing in human life so important and urgent as raising the next generation, and yet it also feels as if we have very little control over the outcome.
—Adam Gopnik (American Essayist, Critic)

This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.
—Dorothy Fuldheim (American TV Journalist)

Prefer punishment to disgraceful gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one’s whole life.
—Chilon of Sparta (Spartan Magistrate)

What passes for good luck is really an infinite number of little good decisions.
—Richard Steinheimer (American Railroad Photographer)

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.
—John Henry Newman (British Theologian, Poet)

To have courage, one must first be afraid. The deeper the fear, the more difficult the climb toward courage.
—Jim Bishop (American Journalist)

When you want to win a game, you have to teach. When you lose a game, you have to learn.
—Tom Landry (American Football Coach)

The road to positivity is strewn with the abandoned vehicles of the faint-hearted.
—Peter McWilliams (American Author)

What people say behind your back is your standing in the community.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

A fault is sooner found than mended.
—Ulpian Fulwell (English Playwright, Satirist)

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded
—Tyne Daly (American Actress, Singer)

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (American Novelist)

The future is always a fairy land to the young.
—George Augustus Henry Sala (British Journalist)

If you have never seen beauty in a moment of suffering, you have never seen beauty at all. If you have never seen joy in a beautiful face, you have never seen joy at all.
—Friedrich Schiller (German Poet)

When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics.
—Voltaire (French Philosopher, Author)

Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
—Thomas Gray (English Poet)

The narrow mind rejects; wisdom accepts.
—Lama Thubten Yeshe (Tibetan Buddhist Teacher)

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
—George William Curtis (American Essayist)

The farther we go, the more the ultimate explanation recedes from us, and all we have left is faith.
—Vaclav Hlavaty (Czech Mathematician, Physicist)

Never claim as a right what you can ask as a favor.
—John Churton Collins (English Literary Critic)

Discontent with the actual is the necessary precondition of every moral change and spiritual rebirth.
—Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian Philosopher, Political Leader)