Archives for June 2014

The most essential factor is persistence—the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
—James Whitcomb Riley (American Children’s Books Writer)

Old age is an insult. It’s like being smacked.
—Lawrence Durrell (British Biographer)

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.
—Colin Powell (American Military Leader)

The good old days were never that good, believe me. The good new days are today, and better days are coming tomorrow. Our greatest songs are still unsung.
—Hubert Humphrey (American Head of State)

I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
—Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)

Ceremony is necessary as the outwork and defense of manners.
—Earl of Chesterfield

Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.
—B. C. Forbes (Scottish-born American Journalist)

The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
—Heywood Hale Broun (American Journalist)

To make the world a friendly place, one must show it a friendly face.
—James Whitcomb Riley (American Children’s Books Writer)

Necessity is often the spur to genius.
—Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)

No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.
—J. P. Morgan (American Businessperson)

Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
—Franz Kafka (Austrian Novelist)

Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)

A real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion. Money must be so far beneath a gentleman that it is hardly worth troubling about.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian Novelist)

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
—Sydney J. Harris (American Journalist)

My angel, cries Booth, it delights me to hear you talk thus, and for a reason you little guess; for I am assured that one who can so heroically endure adversity, will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former, is not likely to be transported with the latter.
—Henry Fielding (English Novelist)

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.
—William Temple

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
—Jimmy Carter (American Head of State)

As riches and favor forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool but nobody could find it out in his prosperity.
—Jean de La Bruyere

Books and proverbs receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.
—William Temple

For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent man works with perseverance.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
—John Muir (Scottish-born American Naturalist)

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home,” why should we not look forward to the arrival?
—C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British Children’s Books Writer)

If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.
—John Henry Newman (British Catholic Clergyman)

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)

If you constantly think of illness, you eventually become ill; if you believe yourself to be beautiful, you become so.
—Shakti Gawain (American Author)

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

We are always looking to the future; the present does not satisfy us.—Our ideal, whatever it may be, lies further on.
—Ezra Hall Gillett

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
—Henry James (American-born British Novelist)

Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.
—Jeremy Collier (English Anglican Theater Critic)

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
—John Lennon (British Singer)

I’ve been called many things, but never an intellectual.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actor)

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
—Henry Adams (American Journalist)

In soloing—as in other activities—it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.
—Amelia Earhart (American Aviator)

Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)

He who knows he has enough is rich.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)

All fortune belongs to him who has a contented mind.
—Panchatantra

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
—Lillian Hellman (American Playwright)

I’m trying to die correctly, but it’s very difficult, you know.
—Lawrence Durrell (British Biographer)

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
—Sun Tzu (Chinese Military Leader)

Ability is of little account without opportunity.
—Napoleon I (French Monarch)

Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
—Ken Blanchard (American Author)

All things are possible until they are proved impossible–even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

When unhappy, one doubts everything; when happy, one doubts nothing.
—Philibert Joseph Roux (French Surgeon)

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.
—Jean de La Bruyere

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women’s lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
—Margaret Mead (American Anthropologist)

The past is the best prophet of the future.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)