Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.
—Vanessa Redgrave (British Actress)
Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should do, they never get around to what they want to do.
—Kathleen Winsor (American Novelist)
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
—Frederick Douglass (American Abolitionist)
Good has but one enemy, the evil; but the evil has two enemies, the good and itself.
—Johannes von Muller (Swiss Historian)
Facts that challenge basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
—Daniel Kahneman (American-Israeli Psychologist, Economist)
When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.
—Willie Nelson (American Country Musician)
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and intruded depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.
—John Hope Franklin (American Historian)
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
—Bruce Lee (American Martial Artist)
A friend is a lot of things, but a critic he isn’t.
—Bert Williams (American Entertainer)
We should not lose ourselves in vainglorious sohemes for changing human nature all over the planet. Rather, we should learn to view ourselves with a sense of proportion and Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given us to live.
—George F. Kennan (American Diplomat, Historian)
Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.
—Francois Mauriac (French Novelist)
Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.
—Queen Elizabeth II (Queen of United Kingdom)
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.
—Seamus Heaney (Irish Poet, Playwright)
The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of.
—Charles Henry Parkhurst (American Clergyman)