Necessity is often the spur to genius.
—Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)
No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.
—J. P. Morgan (American Businessperson)
Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
—Franz Kafka (Austrian Novelist)
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)
A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian Novelist)
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)
Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
—Sydney J. Harris (American Journalist)
My angel, cries Booth, it delights me to hear you talk thus, and for a reason you little guess; for I am assured that one who can so heroically endure adversity, will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former, is not likely to be transported with the latter.
—Henry Fielding (English Novelist)
There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.
—William Temple
If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
—Jimmy Carter (American Head of State)