Archives for October 2021

Mean spirits under disappointment, like small beer in a thunderstorm, always turn sour.
—John Randolph (American Politician)

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.
—Fred Astaire (American Dancer, Singer)

Many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices.
—Jerry Brown (American Politician)

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
—Arthur Wing Pinero (English Playwright)

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
—Jeannette Rankin (American Politician)

A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.
—Suzanne Curchod (French-Swiss Salonist, Writer)

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscious and his sense of duty.
—Anton Chekhov (Russian Short Story Writer)

The mind of man will never be able to contemplate the being, perfections, and providence of God without meeting with inexplicable difficulties.
—Joseph Priestley (English Clergyman, Scientist)

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.
—Henry George (American Economist)

One of the advantages of defeat in life—maybe the main advantage—is that it provides an excuse for change. Defeat … invariably leads to new adventures.
—James Reston

You can’t escape history, or the needs and neuroses you’ve picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth.
—Charles R. Johnson (American Author)

When you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.
—Richard Steele (Irish Writer, Journalist)

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.
—Orson Scott Card (American Author)

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
—Howard Zinn (American Historian, Activist)

He who endures penance and hardships for another delights in that person’s company.
—Malik Muhammad Jayasi (Indian Poet)

Nothing is desperately important and the joy of life is just looking at it.
—Alec Guinness (English Actor)

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
—Frank Deford (American Sportswriter)

Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things—with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.
—Corazon Aquino (Filipino Stateswoman)

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
—Janet Frame (New Zealand writer)

We must not seek happiness in peace, but in conflict.
—Paul Claudel (French Author, Dramatist)

I can see that you have a complex problem: it has a real and an imaginary part.
—John Tukey (American Statistician)

Stick with your own perception of yourself—living in your own world—and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.
—John Eliot (American Psychologist)

There must be more to life than having everything.
—Maurice Sendak (American Writer, Illustrator)

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple.
—Doris Janzen Longacre (American Author)

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart, somewhere or other.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

If you spend life trying to be good at everything you will never be great at anything.
—Tom Rath (American Consultant)

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
—Ruth Graham (American Christian Author)

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
—Jose Saramago (Portuguese Novelist)

A successful person realizes his personal responsibility for self-motivation. He starts with himself because he possesses the key to his own ignition switch.
—Kemmons Wilson (American Entrepreneur)

Doubt is brother devil to despair.
—John Boyle O’Reilly (Irish-American Journalist)

Knowledge begets knowledge. The more I see, the more impressed I am—not with what we know—but with how tremendous the areas are as yet unexplored.
—John Glenn (American Astronaut)

Fashion should not be expected to serve in the stead of courage or character.
—Loretta Young (American Actress)

Envy is like a fly that passes all a body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.
—George Chapman (English Poet, Playwright)

This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the truth, and the truth is the cure. . . . A sick man is like a criminal cast into prison for disobeying some law that man has set up. I plead his case, and if I get the verdict, the criminal is set at liberty. If I fail, I lose the case. His own judgment is his judge, his feelings are his evidence. If my explanation is satisfactory to the judge, you will give me the verdict. This ends the trial, and the patient is released.
—Phineas Quimby

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.
—Enoch Powell (British Politician)

A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—John Burroughs (American Naturalist, Writer)

No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
—Liberty Hyde Bailey (American Botanist)

There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.
—Soichiro Honda (Japanese Inventor)

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates (American Novelist)

I shall not let a sorrow die until I find the heart of it, nor let a wordless joy go by until it talks to me a bit.
—Sara Teasdale (American Poet)

People come to Washington believing it’s the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to the engine.
—Richard N. Goodwin (American Writer)

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
—Queen Elizabeth I (British Monarch)

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Each person is an idiom… an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
—Gordon Allport (American Psychologist)

Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)