Right Attitudes

You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
—Katherine Anne Porter (American Writer)

There’s two kinds of coaches, them that’s fired and them that’s gonna be fired.
—Bum Phillips (American Football Coach)

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.
—Jonathan Haidt (American Social Psychologist)

Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.
—Ilya Prigogine (Belgian Chemist)

You can spend a lifetime, and, if you’re honest with yourself, never once was your work perfect.
—Charlton Heston (American Actor)

How many hopes and fears, how many ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect the parent with the child!
—Samuel Griswold Goodrich (American Publisher)

Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed.
—Hunter S. Thompson (American Journalist)

Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
—E. O. Wilson (American Sociobiologist)

Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
—Emmet Fox (American New Thought Leader)

Age is no barrier. It’s a limitation you put on your mind.
—Jackie Joyner-Kersee (American Athlete)

To succeed in life in today’s world, you must have the will and tenacity to finish the job.
—Chin-Ning Chu (Chinese-American Business Consultant)

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.
—Leonard Nimoy (American Actor)

The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
—Franz Boas (American Anthropologist)

To be free is not to be independent of any form, it is to be master of many forms.
—Sidney Lanier (American Poet)

The best thing that can come with success is the knowledge that it is nothing to long for.
—Liv Ullmann (Norwegian Actress)

Truth cannot be memorized. Truth has to be discovered now, from moment to moment. It is always fresh, always new, always there for the still, innocent mind that has experienced life without needing to hold on to what has gone before.
—Barry Long (Australian Spiritual Teacher)

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
—Charles Mackay (Scottish Poet, Journalist)

He that spends more than he is worth spins a rope for his own neck.
—French Proverb

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
—Groucho Marx (American Actor)

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
—James Madison (American Statesman, President)

Fear makes liars of us all.
—Carmen Maria Machado (American Author, Essayist)

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.
—Florence Scovel Shinn (American Spiritual Writer)

Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.
—Frank Harris (Irish Writer)

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
—Margaret Sanger (American Social Reformer)

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.
—Rosamond Lehmann (English Novelist)

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
—Margery Allingham (British Author)

Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language.
—Paul Fussell (American Historian)

In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind.
—Peter Matthiessen (American Naturalist, Novelist)

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.
—Pedro Almodovar (Spanish Filmmaker)

The only people who like rules are people who lack imagination.
—Simon Sinek (American Motivational Author)

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
—Nancy Friday (American Feminist Author)