Archives for January 2013

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

When you are alone you are all your own.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one’s mind.
—Robert Collier (American Self-Help Author)

Truth never damages a cause that is just.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn’t it time that we should take risks to secure peace?
—Ramsay MacDonald (British Head of State)

Don’t put the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

In the depth of winter I finally learned there was inside me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American Poet)

Life is the sum of all your choices.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
—Robertson Davies (Canada Journalist)

A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English Poet)

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.
—J. P. Morgan (American Businessperson)

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian Philosopher)

A good man doubles the length of his existence; to have lived so as to look back with pleasure on our past life is to live twice.
—Martial (Ancient Roman Latin Poet)

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man, and character is the test of that manifestation.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of man. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
—Virginia Woolf (English Novelist)

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
—Jean de La Fontaine (French Poet)

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
—Voltaire (French Philosopher)

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind? Failure makes people cruel and bitter.
—W. Somerset Maugham (French Playwright)

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man’s life.
—Vita Sackville-West (English Gardener)

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
—Isaac Asimov (Russian-born American Children’s Books Writer)

The word mantra comes from two Sanskrit words man, (“to think”) and tra (“tool”). So the literal translation is “a tool of thought”. And that’s how mantras are used in Buddhist and Hindu practices, as tools that clear your mind of distractions. Because when you focus on repeating that mantra over and over again, soon the noise will die down and all you will hear is your inner voice.
—Russell Simmons (American Entrepreneur)

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.
—W. Somerset Maugham (French Playwright)

But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Things do change. The only question is that since things are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man’s habits change quickly enough?
—Isaac Asimov (Russian-born American Children’s Books Writer)