Right Attitudes

A mind conscious of integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform.
—Robert Burns (Scottish Poet, Songwriter)

Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
—Ihab Hassan (American Literary Theorist)

Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.
—Gerald Jampolsky (American Psychiatrist)

For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.
—George Gissing (English Novelist)

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
—Robert Bresson (French Film Director)

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
—Dale Carnegie (American Self-Help Author)

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might more truly be called the knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
—Max Muller (German-British Orientalist)

If food is your best friend, it’s also your worst enemy.
—Grandpa Jones (American Musician)

You cannot impress the mind of God by having a special Sabbath day set apart to tell Him what you want, and then forgetting Him the rest of the week.
—Wallace Wattles (American New Thought Author)

He who labors as he prays lifts his heart to God with his hands.
—Bernard of Clairvaux (French Catholic Religious Leader)

Truth is inner harmony.
—Walther Rathenau (German Statesman)

We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going day in and out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
—Arnold Bennett (British Novelist)

Laughter is wine for the soul—laugh soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm… Once we can laugh, we can live.
—Sean O’Casey (Irish Dramatist)

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words, than words without a heart.
—John Bunyan (English Writer, Preacher)

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
—Don DeLillo (American Author)

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
—Emily Kimbrough (American Author, Journalist)

A guilty conscience needs no accuser.
—Philippine Proverb

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
—Georges Gurdjieff (Armenian Spiritual Leader)

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
—Erica Jong (American Novelist, Poet)

To play it safe is not to play.
—Robert Altman (American Film Director)

Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there’s a criticism to be made today, it’s that the press isn’t doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.
—Walter Cronkite (American Television Journalist)

The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget.
—John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (British Statesman)

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
—Miguel de Unamuno (Spanish Philosopher, Writer)

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
—Muriel Spark (Scottish Novelist, Poet)

We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
—Lydia Davis (American Author)

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
—Lyman Beecher (American Presbyterian Clergyman)

It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
—Gerard de Nerval (French Poet, Writer)

When wars do come, they fall upon the many, the producing class, who are the sufferers.
—Ulysses S. Grant (American Head of State)

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
—Erik Erikson (German-born American Psychoanalyst)

Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to hear what God would tell us on that very point.
—Henry Clay Trumbull (American Clergyman)

Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.
—Norman Podhoretz (American Political Activist)

Holding on to conditional beliefs about how people should behave toward you because of all you do for them will only set you up to feel disappointment, anger, and resentment to people in particular as well as disillusionment about others in general.
—Harriet B. Braiker (American Psychologist)

Listening to someone talk isn’t at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.
—Oriana Fallaci (Italian Journalist)

Even the worst artist that ever was, even a one-eyed mental deficient with the shakes in both hands who sets out to paint the chicken-house, can enjoy the first stroke. Can think, By God, look what I’ve done. A miracle. … Must be one of the keenest pleasures open to mankind. It’s certainly the greatest an artist can have. It’s also the only one. And it doesn’t last long, usually about five minutes.
—Joyce Cary (English Novelist)

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
—Angela Davis (American Political Activist)

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.
—Joseph Heller (American Novelist)

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
—Wilkie Collins (English Novelist, Playwright)

Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
—R. D. Laing (British Psychiatrist)

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Jean Rhys (British Novelist)

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
—Nora Ephron (American Filmmaker)

Satiety is a mongrel that barks at the heels of plenty.
—Minna Antrim (American Writer, Epigrammist)

By doing good deeds all the time, the mind gets purified. Such a pure mind devoid of any bad thoughts is like a temple in itself.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)