Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.
—Doris Kearns Goodwin (American Historian)
We can easily manage, if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed for it.—But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow to the weight before we are required to bear it.
—John Newton (English Clergyman, Writer)
They made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
—Frank Herbert (American Science-fiction Writer)
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After death has stopped the ears.
—A. E. Housman (English Scholar, Poet)
A scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than another scientist’s definitions.
—Murray Gell-Mann (American Physicist)
Man is born good by nature, only to later become a beast because of the Society.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)
Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
—Joko Beck (American Zen Teacher)
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
—Paul Hawken (American Environmentalist)
The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.
—Robert Anton Wilson (American Polymath)
In the democratic western countries, so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of “freedom,” like a bastard brother of reform.
—Wyndham Lewis (British Artist, Writer)
Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.
—Alice Stone Blackwell (American Suffragist)
Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
—Czeslaw Milosz (Polish-American Poet, Novelist)