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)