When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
—Henri Nouwen (Dutch Catholic Priest)
Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)
All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
—Tennessee Williams (American Playwright)
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt (American Head of State)
The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
—John W. Gardner (American Government Official)
A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Philosopher)
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That’s the essence of inhumanity.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)
No man is happy who does not think himself so.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)
The birds are moulting. If man could only moult also—his mind once a year it’s errors, his heart once a year it’s useless passions.
—James Lane Allen (American Novelist)
A traveler of taste will notice that the wise are polite all over the world, but the fool only at home.
—Oliver Goldsmith (Irish Author)