If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
—Emile Zola (French Novelist)
However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him.
—Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (French Literary Critic)
It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.
—Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese Diarist, Novelist)
The hardest decisions are the ones that don’t maximize upside, but merely avoid a greater loss.
—Jeffrey Immelt (American Businessperson)
A man in good health is always full of advice to the sick.
—Menander (Greek Comic Dramatist)
Youth is not the age to seduce, it’s the age to be seduced.
—Colette (French Novelist, Performer)
All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a high truth could meet with ready acceptance.”
—Max Muller (German-British Orientalist)
A nation’s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)
Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to.
—Katharine Whitehorn (English Journalist)
A good conscience is a continual feast.
—Robert Burton (English Scholar, Clergyman)
The danger inherent in all force grows stronger when it is likely to gain success, for then it becomes temptation.
—Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali Poet, Polymath)
Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.
—R. K. Narayan (Indian Novelist, Short-story Writer)
The enemy is at home.
—Karl Liebknecht (German Socialist)
A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others. For men’s minds, will either feed upon their own good, or upon others’ evil; and who wanteth the one, will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope, to attain to another’s virtue, will seek to come at even hand, by depressing another’s fortune.
—Francis Bacon (English Philosopher)
It is a mark of wisdom not to kick away the very step from which we have risen higher. The removal of one step from a staircase brings down the whole of it.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)
When overwhelmed, after doing any needed planning, just stay in the moment and put one foot in front of the other.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach)
Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.
—John Donne (English Poet, Cleric)