He who does not rouse himself when it is time to rise, who, though young and strong, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle man will never find the way to knowledge.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)
Don’t look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don’t think with your head, think with your hands.
—Taiichi Ohno (Japanese Manufacturing Engineer)
Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel (American Jewish Rabbi)
The most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
—Henry Kissinger (American Diplomat)
It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)
Always so act that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings.
—Immanuel Kant (Prussian German Philosopher)
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
—John Berger (English Art Critic, Essayist, Novelist)
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
—Herman Melville (American Novelist)
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
—Martial (Ancient Roman Latin Poet)
With just enough of learning to misquote.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)
Our only true course is to let the motive for action be in the action itself, never in its reward; not to be incited by the hope of the result, nor yet indulge a propensity for inertness.
—Helena Blavatsky (Ukrainian-born American Theosophist)
There are two different states of human existence: first, to live without thinking of death; second, to live with the thought that you approach death with every hour of your life.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)
But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well.
—Charlotte Bronte (English Novelist, Poet)
People who study psychology and the pitfalls of the human mind are no less prone to making errors of judgement and cognition than people who don’t know anything about it.
—Jason Zweig (American Personal Finance Columnist)
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
—Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher)