Archives for January 2012

To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
—Jeremy Collier (English Anglican Theater Critic)

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
—Jonathan Swift (Irish Satirist)

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
—Iris Murdoch (English Novelist)

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
—Igor Stravinsky (Russian-born American Composer)

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German Lutheran Pastor)

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic)

What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
—David Foster Wallace (American Novelist)

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
—Eugene O’Neill (American Playwright)

Advanced countries of today have reached their present affluence through domination of other races and countries…Their sheer ruthlessness, undisturbed by feelings of compassion or by abstract theories of freedom, equality or justice, gave them a head start.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

You find a way, somehow to get through the most horrible things, things you think would kill you. You find a way and you move through the days, one by one, in shock, in despair, but you move. The days pass, one after the other, and you go along with them – occasionally stunned, and not entirely relieved, to find that you are still alive.
—Michelle Richmond (American Novelist)

The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
—Frederick II of Prussia (Prussian Monarch)

The more comfort becomes your priority, the more contracted you become with fear.
—T. Harv Eker (American Motivational Speaker)

Time is the product of changing realities, beings, existences.
—Nikolai Berdyaev (Russian Christian Philosopher)

In small proportions we just beauties see,|And in short measures life may perfect be.
—Ben Jonson (English Dramatist)

Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

One must not hold one’s self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one’s creations.
—Ludwig van Beethoven (German Composer)

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
—Ernest Hemingway (American Author)

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
—Joshua L. Liebman (American Jewish Rabbi)

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
—John Weiss (American Author)

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.
—Golda Meir (Israeli Head of State)

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.
—Stevie Wonder (American Singer)

Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.
—Ludwig van Beethoven (German Composer)

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
—Marlene Dietrich (German-born American Actor)

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.
—Charles Sanders Peirce (American Philosopher)

Clarity moves much more efficiently than violence or stress.
—Byron Katie (American Speaker)

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.
—Lisa Kirk (American Actor)

Be grateful for yourself… be thankful.
—William Saroyan (American Novelist)

No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon (English Poet)

I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.
—Madeleine Albright (Czech-born American Diplomat)

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
—Barbara Kingsolver (American Novelist)

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actor)

If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

Contemplate the wonders of creation, the Divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from a distance, but as the reality in which you live.
—Abraham Isaac Kook (Latvian-born Jewish Rabbi)

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.
—Sheridan Le Fanu (Irish Novelist)

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

If things are not going well with you, begin your effort at correcting the situation by carefully examining the service you are rendering, and especially the spirit in which you are rendering it.
—Roger Babson (American Entre)

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.
—Mel Brooks (American Film Actor)

To know that which lies before us in daily life is the prime wisdom.
—John Milton (English Poet)