The test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones.
—Wendell Willkie (American Politician)
A gentleman is one who is too brave to lie, too generous to cheat, and who takes his share of the world and lets other people have theirs.
—Paul G. Hoffman (American Businessperson)
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
—Iris Murdoch (English Novelist)
You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.
—Barbara De Angelis (American Lecturer)
My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between, I occupy myself as best I can.
—Cary Grant (British-born American Actor)
Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work, risking, and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful: yourself.
—Alan Alda (American Actor)
Common sense is strengthened by joy.
—Nachman of Breslov (Ukrainian Jewish Religions Leader)
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose-a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
—Mary Shelley (English Novelist)
A word of kindness is seldom spoken in vain, while witty sayings are as easily lost as the pearls slipping from a broken string.
—George D. Prentice (American Journalist)
There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
—Victor Hugo (French Novelist)
We’ll do all right if we can capitalize on our mistakes.
—Mickey Rivers (American Sportsperson)
The biggest problem in the world could have been solved when it was small.
—Witter Bynner (American Poet)
When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed but your childhood.
—Sam Ewing (American Sportsperson)
Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve as revenge. To show that I could.
—Roman Polanski (French Film Director)
If there is anything that can be called genius, it consists chiefly in the ability to give that attention to a subject which keeps it steadily in the mind, till we have surveyed it accurately on all sides.
—Thomas Reid (Scottish Philosopher)
If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
—Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu