The best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras (French Novelist, Playwright)
The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.
—Dale Turner (American Congregational Priest)
Humor is something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
—Victor Borge (Danish-American Comedian, Musician)
A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
—Charles Cooley (American Sociologist)
A purified mind can grasp anything. It can dive deep into the subtlest subject and understand even transcendental things.
—Sivananda Saraswati (Hindu Spiritual Teacher)
If you’ve truly committed yourself to something, given it all you’ve got, and then concluded that it is not for you—move on to something else.
—Susan Jeffers (American Self-Help Author)
Love lives on. Those we love are never really lost to us. We feel them in so many special ways—through friends they always cared about and dreams they left behind, in beauty that they added to our days, in words of wisdom we still carry with us, and memories that never will be gone. Those we love are never really lost to us—for everywhere their special love lives on.
—Amanda Bradley (American Poet)
Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.
—Hesiod (Greek Poet)
The greater perfection a soul aspires after, the more dependent it is upon Divine Grace.
—Brother Lawrence (French Carmelite Monk)
Aim at a high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, nor the second, and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting. Finally you’ll hit the bull’s-eye of success, for only practice will make you perfect.
—Annie Oakley (American Markswoman)
From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.
—William Lawrence Bragg (British Physicist)
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.
—Upton Sinclair (American Novelist, Social Reformer)