Nagesh Belludi

The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.
—David Ogilvy (British Advertising Executive)

That’s what happens when you’re angry at people. You make them part of your life.
—Garrison Keillor (American Broadcaster, Writer)

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
—Zora Neale Hurston (American Novelist)

Flowers in a city are like lipstick on a woman—it just makes you look better to have a little color.
—Lady Bird Johnson (First Lady of the United States)

Failure at a task may be the result of having tackled it at the wrong time.
—Brendan Behan (Irish Poet)

I’m not going to die,
I’m going home
Like a shooting star.
—Sojourner Truth (African-American Abolitionist)

No soul can preserve the bloom and delicacy of its existence without lonely musings and silent prayer, and the greatness of this necessity is in proportion to the greatness of evil.
—Frederic William Farrar (British Theological Writer)

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German Lutheran Pastor)

Great joy, especially after a sudden change of circumstances, is apt to be silent, and dwells rather in the heart than on the tongue.
—Henry Fielding (English Novelist)

The truth is that most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. And even if they are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance.
—Sam Harris (American Neuroscientist, Atheist, Author)

The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
—John Steinbeck (American Novelist)

Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
—Montesquieu (French Political Philosopher)

Failure is delay, but not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end street.
—William Arthur Ward (American Author)

Tact is the great ability to see other people as they think you see them.
—Carl Zuckmayer (German Playwright)

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
—Blaise Pascal (French Philosopher, Scientist)

All that attention to the perfect lighting, the perfect this, the perfect that, I find terribly annoying.
—Meryl Streep (American Actor)

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.
—Virgil (Roman Poet)

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (American Physician, Essayist)

An act of meditation is actually an act of faith–of faith in your spirit, in your own potential. Faith is the basis of meditation. Not of faith in something outside you–a metaphysical Buddha, an unattainable ideal, or someone else’s words. The faith is in yourself, in your own “Buddha-nature”. You too can be a Buddha, an awakened being that lives and responds in a wise, creative, and compassionate way.
—Martine Batchelor (French Buddhist Teacher)

When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable.
—Leigh Hunt (British Author)

Years ago, the business schools used to pose it as a conundrum. They would say, `Well, who comes first? Your employees, your shareholders, or your customers?’ But it’s not a conundrum. Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.
—Herb Kelleher (American Entrepreneur)

We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognize and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses – secret senses, sixth senses, if you will – equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.
—Oliver Sacks (British Neurologist, Writer)

As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.
—Jeremy Bentham (British Philosopher, Economist)

You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.
—Amelia Earhart (American Aviator)

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
—Mignon McLaughlin (American Journalist)

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.
—Christina Rossetti (English Poet)

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)

He who has not the weakness of friendship has not the strength.
—Joseph Joubert (French Essayist)

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher, Writer)

Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one’s enemies.
—Leon Trotsky (Russian Revolutionary)

Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We see only the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

I hate when I read “Try that Jennifer Aniston Diet.” There was no diet!
—Jennifer Aniston (American Actress)

The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.
—Erich Fromm (German Social Philosopher)

Teach thy tongue to say “I do not know” and thou shalt progress.
—Moses Maimonides (Jewish Philosopher, Rabbinic Scholar)

Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic)

Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan’s egg.
—Hans Christian Andersen (Danish Author)

In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
—Lee Iacocca (American Businessperson)

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
—Jonathan Swift (Irish Satirist)

An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.
—Edmund Burke (British Philosopher, Statesman)

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew. Their names were: Where, What, When, Why, How and Who.
—Rudyard Kipling (British Children’s Books Writer)

Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly, and in a spirit of love.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (American Abolitionist)

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
—James Baldwin (American Novelist, Social Critic)

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it’s suffering.
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (Roman Poet)