Search Results for: stoic

A man can do all things if he but wills them.
—Leon Battista Alberti (Italian Architect)

Some lives drift here and there like reeds in a stream, depending on changing currents for their activity. Others are like swimmers knowing the depth of the water. Each stroke helps them onward to a definite objective.
—Margaret Sanger (American Social Reformer)

Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt.
—Eric Sevareid (American Broadcast Journalist)

Hope never abandons you, you abandon it.
—George Weinberg (American Psychologist)

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world—that I am able to change it in positive ways.
—Maxine Hong Kingston (American Novelist, Memoirist)

Man is the most intelligent of the animals—and the most silly.
—Diogenes Laertius (Greek Biographer)

Regret is an odd emotion because it comes only upon reflection. Regret lacks immediacy, and so its power seldom influences events when it could do some good.
—Edward William O’Rourke (American Catholic Priest)

Remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power. Never forget that you can still do your share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and frustrations and disappointments.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel (American Jewish Rabbi)

Reason is the director of man’s will, discovering in action what is good, for the laws of well-doing are the dictates of right reason.
—Thomas Hooker (American Clergyman)

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
—Tommy Lasorda (American Baseball Player, Coach)

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
—Josiah Royce (American Philosopher)

God gives to us according to the measure of our hearts.
—Persian Proverb

Life is neither a good nor an evil, but simply the scene of good and evil.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
—Daniel Barenboim (Israeli Pianist, Conductor)

To know how to dispense with things is to possess them.
—Jean-Francois Regnard (French Dramatist)

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.
—Christopher Fry (English Poet, Playwright)

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear as the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts that work no harm do terrify us more than men in steel with bloody purposes.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich (American Writer)

A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind.
—Joseph Weizenbaum (American Computer Scientist)

I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Austrian Composer)

Peace comes from feelings of satisfaction when working with joy, living with hope, loving with abandonment.
—Arnold Hutschnecker (American Psychiatrist)

Success is the child of audacity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

I maintain that nothing useful and lasting can emerge from violence.
—Shirin Ebadi (Iranian Human Rights Activist)

Hold your children with your heart but teach them with your hands.
—Russian Proverb

Committee—a group of men who keep minutes and waste hours.
—Milton Berle (American Entertainer)

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
—John Hersey (American Novelist, Journalist)

There is a certain state of health that does not allow us to understand everything; and perhaps illness shuts us off from certain truths; but health shuts us off just as effectively from others.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.
—Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome, Stoic Philosopher)

True wisdom comes from the overcoming of suffering and sin. All true wisdom is therefore touched with sadness.
—Whittaker Chambers (American Journalist)

The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.
—Clive James (Australian Writer, Broadcaster, TV Critic)

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
—Naomi Wolf (American Feminist Writer)

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people’s minds.
—Walter Bagehot (English Economist, Journalist)

As if reasoning were any kind of writing or talking which tends to convince people that some doctrine or measure is true and right.
—Catharine Beecher (American Educationalist, Reformer)

Great people aren’t those who are happy at times of convenience and content, but of how they are in times of catastrophe and controversy.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
—Margaret Atwood (Canadian Author)

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament, not of income.
—Logan Pearsall Smith (American-British Essayist)

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
—Alan Watts (British-American Philosopher)

I find I’m luckier when I work harder.
—Denton Cooley (American Surgeon)

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
—Paul McCartney (British Pop Musician)

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
—J. G. Ballard (English Novelist)

He that has a penny in his purse, is worth a penny: Have and you shall be esteemed.
—Petronius (Roman Courtier)

Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny.
—Emiliano Zapata (Mexican Revolutionary)

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.
—Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome, Stoic Philosopher)

Remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power. Never forget that you can still do your share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and frustrations and disappointments.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel (American Jewish Rabbi)

If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

Our great men have written words of wisdom to be used when hardship must be faced. Life obliges us with hardship so the words of wisdom shouldn’t go to waste.
—Jerry Bock (American Composer)

In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
—Iris Murdoch (British Novelist, Philosopher)

A man’s opinion of danger varies at different times according to his animal spirits, and he is actuated by considerations which he dares not avow.
—Tobias Smollett (Scottish Poet)

There is the same difference between the tongues of some, as between the hour and the minute hand; one goes ten times as fast, and the other signifies ten times as much.
—Sydney Smith (English Preacher)

More than whether you live or die, it’s how you are living or dying that is important.
—Robert Thurman (American Buddhist Scholar)

Are you really listening… or are you just waiting for your turn to talk?
—Robert Montgomery (American Actor)

To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho) (Indian Spiritual Teacher)

A human being is happiest and most successful when dedicated to a cause outside his own individual, selfish satisfaction.
—Benjamin Spock (American Pediatrician)

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
—Colin Wilson (British Philosopher)

A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it,—prate of woman’s rights, of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, “A woman’s function plainly is… to talk.” Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (English Poet)

You can do more than pray after you have prayed but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.
—Samuel Dickey Gordon (American Evangelical Author)

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.
—Margaret Drabble (English Novelist)

If you aren’t cute, you may as well be clever.
—David Sedaris (American Humorist, Essayist)

Growth has its season. There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter. And then spring and summer again. As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all be well.
—Jerzy Kosinski (American Novelist, Essayist)

It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature…. What is intelligible is also beautiful.
—Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Indian-American Astrophysicist)

We ought to fear a man who hates himself, for we are at risk of becoming victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to lure him into self-love.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

It’s better to live as your own man than as a fool in someone else’s dream.
—Martin Landau (American Actor)

The superior man is he who develops in harmonious proportions, his moral, intellectual, and physical nature. This should be the end at which men of all classes should aim, and it is this only which constitutes real greatness.
—Douglas William Jerrold (English Dramatist)

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
—Shirley Chisholm (American Politician)

Like a stone That rolls down a hill, I have come to this day.
—Takuboku Ishikawa (Japanese Poet)

The magnificent and the ridiculous are so close that they touch.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (French Man of Letters)

Faith assuages, guides, restores.
—Arthur Rimbaud (French Poet)

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)

Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Spiritual Teacher)

Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.
—Hans Morgenthau (American Political Scientist)

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions, and actions of others.
—Johann Kaspar Lavater (Swiss Theologian, Poet)

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—Rachel Carson (American Biologist)

It is with life just as with swimming; that man is the most expert who is the most disengaged from all encumbrances.
—Apuleius (Roman Prose Writer)

Life is neither a good nor an evil, but simply the scene of good and evil.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
—Archibald Cox (American Lawyer)

The will to prepare is more important that the will to win.
—LaVell Edwards (American Football Coach)

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic, Author)

Life is one long jubilee.
—Ira Gershwin (American Lyricist)

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.
—Annie Besant (British-born Indian Theosophist)

To believe with certainty, we must begin by doubting.
—Polish Proverb

Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.
—Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali Poet, Polymath)

Some plague the people with too long sermons; for the faculty of listening is a tender thing, and soon becomes weary and satiated.
—Martin Luther (German Protestant Theologian)

The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
—Muriel Strode (American Author, Businesswoman)

Haste is of the devil.
—The Holy Quran (Sacred Scripture of Islam)

Next to the assumption of power is the responsibility of relinquishing it.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul’s own doing.
—Marie Stopes (British Author, Social Activist)

Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.
—Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome, Stoic Philosopher)

It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.
—Sandra Day O’Connor (American Jurist)

Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.
—Rosa Parks (American Civil Rights Leader)

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (English Romantic Poet)

I am a liberated woman. And I do believe if a woman does equal work she should be paid equal money. But personally I am feminine and I do like male authority to lean on.
—Julie Andrews (British Actress, Singer)