When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.
—The Bhagavad Gita (Hindu Scripture)
It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.
—Colette (French Novelist, Performer)
Simplicity and naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
—W. Somerset Maugham (British Novelist)
Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.
—Joseph Conrad (Polish-born British Novelist)
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.
—Katherine Mansfield (British Author)
I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic.
—Lisa Alther (American Novelist)
The wrinkles of the heart are more indelible than those of the brow.
—Dorothee Luzy Dotinville (French Dancer, Actress)
Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
—Buddhist Teaching
Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.
—Lyndon B. Johnson (American Head of State)
Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it.
—Lucy Maud Montgomery (Canadian Novelist, Children’s Writer)
Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
—Maria Montessori (Italian Physician, Educator)
If one understands eternity as timelessness, and not as an unending timespan, then whoever lives in the present lives for all time.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian-born British Philosopher)
Let a man take time enough for the most trival deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99% of it. People in that 1% will come to you because you have shown how much you value them.
—Derek Sivers (American Entrepreneur)