Archives for August 2014

I have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what are the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than three-score years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, that health is a great blessing; competence obtained by honorable industry is a great blessing; and a great blessing it is, to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
—Ingrid Bergman (Swedish Actor)

The men who have done big things are those who were not afraid to attempt big things, who were not afraid to risk failure in order to gain success.
—B. C. Forbes (Scottish-born American Journalist)

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
—Edgar Degas (French Painter)

Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hours will last.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.
—Lillian Hellman (American Playwright)

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality—the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
—A. C. Benson (English Essayist)

Adversity is the first path to truth: He who hath proved war, storm or woman’s rage, whether his winters be eighteen or eighty, has won the experience which is deem’d so weighty.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)

You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things—to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.
—Edmund Hillary (New Zealander Explorer)

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
—Margaret Mead (American Anthropologist)

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same—and most mothers kiss and scold together.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Mistakes are often the best teachers.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British Children’s Books Writer)

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
—Bruce Lee (Hong-Kong-born American Sportsperson)

When I wanted to understand what is happening today, I try to decide what will happen tomorrow; I look back, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (American Jurist)

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
—Jean de La Bruyere

There are only two ways of getting on in the world; by one’s own industry, or by the stupidity of others.
—Jean de La Bruyere

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence, but in the mastery, of his passions.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)

A human being is only interesting if he’s in contact with himself. I learned you have to trust yourself, be what you are, and do what you ought to do the way you should do it. You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.
—Barbra Streisand (American Musician)

It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character.
—Rev. Dale Turner

Are you doing the kind of work you were built for, so that you can expect to be able to do very large amounts of that kind and thrive under it? Or are you doing a kind of which you can do comparatively little?
—B. C. Forbes (Scottish-born American Journalist)

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
—Anne Louise Germaine de Stael

Therefore the skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
—Sun Tzu (Chinese Military Leader)

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
—Don Marquis (American Humorist)

As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
—Jean de La Bruyere

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
—Horace Mann (American Educator)

We conquer by continuing.
—George Matheson (Scottish Theologian)

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong.”
—Sydney J. Harris (American Journalist)

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
—Franz Kafka (Austrian Novelist)

Death teaches us to live; it gives us a boundary to map our living within. Death’s hammer breaks through the mirror separating us from light.
—David Seltzer (American Screenwriter)

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Scientist)

The future looks extremely bright indeed, with lots of possibilities ahead—big possibilities. Like the song says, “We’ve just begun.”
—Bruce Lee (Hong-Kong-born American Sportsperson)

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
—Henry James (American-born British Novelist)

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.
—A. C. Benson (English Essayist)

When I’m not thank’d at all, I’m thank’d enough. I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more.
—Henry Fielding (English Novelist)

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
—Robert Brault

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (American Architect)

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings.
—Helen Hayes (American Actor)

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian Novelist)

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events, and in today already walks tomorrow.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

Age is not important unless you’re a cheese.
—Helen Hayes (American Actor)

Do a little more each day than you think you possibly can.
—Lowell Thomas (American Writer)

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.
—John Lennon (British Singer)