A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (English Writer, Politician)
The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)
The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)
When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
—Yann Martel (Canadian Novelist)
Successful careers are those that realize in the man the dreams of the child.
—Wallace Stevens (American Poet)
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
—Donna Tartt (American Novelist)
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us.
—Max De Pree (American Businessman)
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
—Michelangelo (Italian Painter)
Pain was their body’s way of telling them that they’d pushed themselves to their limits—which was exactly where they were supposed to be.
—Richard Marcinko (American Navy Officer)
Ignorance is not merely a deficiency of knowledge but, in addition, it positively apprehends reality in a distinctive way. And being a distorted mode of conception, it creates a view of the world that is in opposition to, and in conflict with, the actual way the world is.
—Stephen Batchelor (British Buddhist Author, Teacher)
A man’s doubts and fears are his worst enemies.
—William Wrigley, Jr. (American Businessman)