Archives for May 2024

Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
—James E. Burke (American Business Executive)

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
—Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Founder of the Turkish Republic)

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
—Christopher Isherwood (Anglo-American Novelist, Playwright)

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.
—Soong Mei-ling (Chinese Political Figure)

The job of arguing with the umpire belongs to the manager, because it won’t hurt the team if he gets thrown out of the game.
—Earl Weaver (American Baseball Player, Manager)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
—William C. Dement (American Sleep Researcher)

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
—Ralph Ellison (American Novelist)

We can make inspired guesses, but we don’t know for certain what physical and chemical properties of the planet’s crust, its ocean, and its atmosphere made it so conducive to such a sudden appearance of life …
—Isaac Asimov (American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist)

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (English Poet)

When people have nothing, all they want is a handful of grains.
When they become wealthy, they treat the world like a straw.
Material objects by themselves are not great or worthless.
It is the fluctuating fortune of people that makes things appear big or small.
—Bhartrihari (Hindu Philosopher, Grammarian)

Ask thy purse what thou should spend.
—Scottish Proverb

I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.
—N. R. Narayana Murthy (Indian Businessperson)

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.
—Dwight Morrow (American Businessman, Diplomat)

No doing without some ruing.
—Sigrid Undset (Norwegian Novelist)

Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world.
—Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. (American Theatre Manager)

The day I become content is the day I cease to be anything more than a man who hit home runs.
—Hank Aaron (American Baseball Player)

Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn’t so.
—Charles Bukowski (American Writer)

A library is where you meet fascinating characters you never forget.
—Judy Blume (American Author)

There’s been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.
—Michael Pollan (American Food Writer)

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.
—George Moore (Irish Writer)

It is very very difficult to lift the rock till the peak of the mountain. But it’s very very easy to get the same rock from the peak to the mountain foot. In the same way it is very difficult task to induce noble thoughts in to a person’s mind and to make him/her a good individual. But it’s far more simple to induce bad habits in a person.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)

Charity ain’t giving people what you wants to give, it’s giving people what they need to get.
—Terry Pratchett (English Fantasy Writer)

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn’t she behave like a nice man?
—Edith Evans (English Actress)

It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actress)

It’s a terribly hard job to spend a billion dollars and get your money’s worth.
—George M. Humphrey (American Lawyer)

When fortune empties her chamber pot on your head, smile and say We are going to have a summer shower.
—John A. Macdonald (Canadian Statesman)

The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, ‘I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.’ Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.
—Stephane Hessel (French Diplomat, Writer, Concentration Camp Surviv)