What I’ve learned about being angry with people is that it generally hurts you more than it hurts them.
—Oprah Winfrey (American TV Personality)
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from the disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
—Edgar Allan Poe (American Poet)
Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do, and how you do it.
—Rudy Giuliani (American Politician)
Hard work and a proper frame of mind prepare you for the lucky breaks that come along—or don’t.
—Harrison Ford (American Actor)
That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)
Men are alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.
—Moliere (French Playwright)
Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the “lessons of history” are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers.
—Ramachandra Guha (Indian Historian)
To tell the truth is the same as to be a good tailor, or to be a good farmer, or to write beautifully. To be good at any activity requires practice: no matter how hard you try, you cannot do naturally what you have not done repeatedly. In order to get accustomed to speaking the truth, you should tell only the truth, even in the smallest of things.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)
No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)
The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
—Angela Carter (English Novelist, Short Story Writer)
The difference between a simpleton and an intelligent man, according to the man who is convinced that he is of the latter category, is that the former wholeheartedly accepts all things that he sees and hears while the latter never admits anything except after a most searching scrutiny. He imagines his intelligence to be a sieve of closely woven mesh through which nothing but the finest can pass.
—R. K. Narayan (Indian Novelist, Short-story Writer)
From a management standpoint, it is very important to know how to unleash people’s inborn creativity. My concept is that anybody has creative ability, but very few people know how to use it.
—Akio Morita (Japanese Entrepreneur, Engineer)
The effect of having other interests beyond those domestic works well. The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.
—Amelia Earhart (American Aviator)