This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the truth, and the truth is the cure. . . . A sick man is like a criminal cast into prison for disobeying some law that man has set up. I plead his case, and if I get the verdict, the criminal is set at liberty. If I fail, I lose the case. His own judgment is his judge, his feelings are his evidence. If my explanation is satisfactory to the judge, you will give me the verdict. This ends the trial, and the patient is released.
—Phineas Quimby
No battle is worth fighting except the last one.
—Enoch Powell (British Politician)
A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—John Burroughs (American Naturalist, Writer)
No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
—Liberty Hyde Bailey (American Botanist)
There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.
—Soichiro Honda (Japanese Inventor)
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates (American Novelist)
I shall not let a sorrow die until I find the heart of it, nor let a wordless joy go by until it talks to me a bit.
—Sara Teasdale (American Poet)
People come to Washington believing it’s the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to the engine.
—Richard N. Goodwin (American Writer)
Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
—Queen Elizabeth I (British Monarch)
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)
Each person is an idiom… an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
—Gordon Allport (American Psychologist)
Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)