A man’s opinion of danger varies at different times according to his animal spirits, and he is actuated by considerations which he dares not avow.
—Tobias Smollett (Scottish Poet)
There is the same difference between the tongues of some, as between the hour and the minute hand; one goes ten times as fast, and the other signifies ten times as much.
—Sydney Smith (English Preacher)
More than whether you live or die, it’s how you are living or dying that is important.
—Robert Thurman (American Buddhist Scholar)
Are you really listening… or are you just waiting for your turn to talk?
—Robert Montgomery (American Actor)
To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho) (Indian Spiritual Teacher)
A human being is happiest and most successful when dedicated to a cause outside his own individual, selfish satisfaction.
—Benjamin Spock (American Pediatrician)
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
—Colin Wilson (British Philosopher)
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it,—prate of woman’s rights, of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, “A woman’s function plainly is… to talk.” Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English Poet)
You can do more than pray after you have prayed but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.
—Samuel Dickey Gordon (American Evangelical Author)
Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
—Margaret Drabble (English Novelist)
If you aren’t cute, you may as well be clever.
—David Sedaris (American Humorist, Essayist)
Growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well.
—Jerzy Kosinski (American Novelist, Essayist)
It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature…. What is intelligible is also beautiful.
—Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Indian-American Astrophysicist)
We ought to fear a man who hates himself, for we are at risk of becoming victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to lure him into self-love.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)