The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
—Aung San Suu Kyi (Burmese Political Activist)
Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.
—Sandra Day O’Connor (American Jurist)
Everyday I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.
—Claude Monet (French Painter)
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)
A donkey that is made to have bath in a sacred river does not become a horse. He, who does not have a pure mind, does not listen to any good advice. Even if a sweet juice is fed to a snake, there won’t be any reduction in its poison.
—Tukaram (Indian Marathi Poet)
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
—Ross Perot (American Businessman)
When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind’s disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
—Gerard de Nerval (French Romantic Poet)
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
—Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British Philosopher)
A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.
—Quintilian (Roman Rhetorician, Literary Critic)
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
—Annie Dillard (American Writer)
A small debt makes a man your debtor, a large one makes him your enemy.
—Seneca the Elder (Marcus Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Rhetorician)
There seems to me a thousand occasions when my soul knows more than it can tell, and a has a spirit of it’s own which is far superior to my everyday one. It seems to me too, that men are far superior to all the books they write.
—Pierre de Marivaux (French Dramatist, Author)
Good luck needs no explanation.
—Shirley Temple (American Actress, Diplomat)
When saluted with a salutation, salute the person with a better salutation, or at least return the same, for God taketh account of all things.
—The Holy Quran (Sacred Scripture of Islam)
Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room.
—Michael Dell (American Businessperson)