Nagesh Belludi

A thick skin is a gift from God.
—Konrad Adenauer (German Statesman)

The upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.
—Sheryl Sandberg (American Executive, Author)

The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.
—Edward Thorndike (American Psychologist)

It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.
—Edgar Z. Friedenberg (American Sociologist)

There is no more interesting place in the world to meet characters than a movie set. If you have lost anybody anywhere in the World and don’t know where they are, they are in Hollywood trying to get in the Movies.
—Will Rogers (American Humorist, Actor)

Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.
—Anita Roddick (English Businessperson)

The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.
—Peter L. Bernstein (American Economist, Author)

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.
—Evander Holyfield (American Boxer)

When you get right down to it, one of the most important tasks of a leader is to eliminate his people’s excuse for failure.
—Robert C. Townsend (American Businessman)

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
—J. B. Priestley (British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist)

If it’s intuitive, it’s probably wrong. The absolutely distinguishing quality of a leader is that a leader takes us elsewhere.
—Bob Galvin (American Business Executive)

This is where you will win the battle—in the playhouse of your mind.
—Maxwell Maltz (American Surgeon)

Once you have been confronted with a life-and-death situation, trivia no longer matters. Your perspective grows and you live at a deeper level. There’s no time for pettiness.
—Happy Rockefeller (American Philanthropist)

I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
—Billie Holiday (American Jazz Singer)

It’s just as easy to be happy with a lot of money as with a little.
—Marvin Traub (American Businessman)

We are only vulnerable and ridiculous through our pretensions.
—Delphine de Girardin (French Novelist)

Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture—a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
—Claude Debussy (French Composer)

If heaven had granted me five more years, I could have become a real painter.
—Hokusai (Japanese Artist, Wood Engraver)

A fault confessed is half redressed.
—African Proverb

One ought to go too far, in order to know how far one can go.
—Heinrich Boll (German Writer)

You gotta play the hand that’s dealt you. There may be pain in that hand, but you play it.
—James Brady (American Government Official)

An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
—Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand-born Physicist)

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
—Eugene Ionesco (French Dramatist)

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
—Lionel Trilling (American Critic)

Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways—and all are right! At least all will do.
—Heywood Broun (American Journalist)

You will never know a man till you do business with him.
—Scottish Proverb

We find it hard to believe that other people’s thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.
—James Harvey Robinson (American Historian)

The formula for success is simple: practice and concentration then more practice and more concentration.
—Babe Didrikson Zaharias (American Athlete)

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
—Friedrich Engels (German Socialist Political Philosopher)

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.
—Malcolm Gladwell (Canadian Journalist, Author)

Fullness of knowledge always and necessarily means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance, and that is always conducive to both humility and reverence.
—Robert Andrews Millikan (American Physicist)

God has so made the mind of man that a peculiar deliciousness resides in the fruits of personal industry.
—William Wilberforce (English Social Reformer)

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
—John Updike (American Author)

Go on—but don’t think you can kill my confidence. I’ve had experts doing it for years.
—John Osborne (English Playwright, Actor)

The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it.
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American Feminist, Writer)

Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
—Nathaniel Branden (American Psychotherapist)

So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character.—Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously attentive to cleanliness who was a consummate villain.
—Benjamin Thompson (American-British Scientist)

An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (Spanish Philosopher)

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.
—Frank Moore Colby (American Writer, Editor)

Persevering mediocrity is much more respectable, and unspeakably more useful, than talented inconstancy.
—James Hamilton (Scottish Protestant Minister)

You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.
—Darren Hardy (American Author)

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
—Primo Levi (Italian Novelist, Poet)

The criterion of simplicity requires that the minimum number of assumptions be postulated.
—Albert Low (Canadian Zen Master)