You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don’t hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it’s never the same.
—Marjorie Kellogg (American Author)
This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. … As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.
—James Mill (Scottish Philosopher)
Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.
—Nathalie Sarraute (French Novelist)
The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—Charles Kingsley (English Clergyman)
Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.
—Washington Irving (American Author)
One of the great penalties those of us who live our lives in full view of the public must pay is the loss of that most cherished birthright of man’s privacy.
—Mary Pickford (American-Canadian Film Actress)
For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
—Thomas Keating (American Trappist Monk)
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
—Alfred North Whitehead (English Mathematician, Philosopher)
Success is the child of audacity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself… That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz (American Poet)
Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)