Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
—Jim Collins (American Management Consultant)
It seems to me that we generally do not have a correct measure of our own wisdom.
—R. K. Narayan (Indian Novelist, Short-story Writer)
Eat and drink to live; live not to eat and drink, for thus do the beasts.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)
You can really have everything you want, if you go after it, but you will have to want it. The desire for success must be so strong within you that it is the very breath of your life—your first though when you awaken in the morning, your last thought when you go to bed at night…
—Charles E. Popplestone (American Author)
Unwritten thought is an incomplete thought.
—Edgar V. Roberts (American Scholar)
Men who know themselves are no longer fools; they stand on the threshold of the Door of Wisdom.
—Havelock Ellis (British Essayist, Physician)
We are ne’er like angels till our passion dies.
—Thomas Dekker
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it’s intimate and psychological—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (American Social Critic)
Filthy water cannot be washed.
—African Proverb
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning—in other words, of absurdity—the more energetically meaning is sought.
—Vaclav Havel (Czech Dramatist, Statesman)
Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
—Malcolm Muggeridge (English Journalist)
Example is leadership.
—Albert Schweitzer (French Theologian)
In bed we laugh; in bed we cry; in bed are born; in bed we die; the near approach the bed doth show, of human bliss to human woe.
—Isaac de Benserade (French Poet, Dramatist)