The significance of man is that he is insignificant and aware of it.
—Carl L. Becker (American Historian)
isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?
—Donna Tartt (American Novelist)
A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.
—Stephen Toulmin (British Philosopher)
Our actual enemy is not any force exterior tourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.
—Sri Aurobindo (Indian Mystic, Philosopher, Poet)
It seems to me probably that any one who has a series of intolerable positions to put up with must have been responsible for them to some extent … they have contributed to it by impatience or intolerance, or brusqueness—or some provocation.
—Robert Hugh Benson (English Author, Clergyman)
The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.
—Stanley Kunitz (American Poet)
Many are studying how to extend life, when instead it should be enlarged.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)
Commit a sin twice, and you will think it perfectly allowable.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)
If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.
—Jeff Bezos (American Businessman)
Pennies don’t fall from heaven. They have to be earned on earth.
—Margaret Thatcher (British Head of State)
It isn’t by size that you win or fail—be the best of whatever you are.
—Douglas Malloch (American Poet, Short-story Writer)
It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.
—Paul Auster (American Novelist, Poet)
When you really believe—in yourself, in your dream—you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality. No great achievement happens by luck.
—Howard Schultz (American Businessman)