Right Attitudes

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.
—Sappho (Greek Poet)

Our mistakes from the past are just that: mistakes. And they were necessary to make in order to become the wiser person we became.
—Bill Maher (American Comedian TV Personality)

Do what you fear most and you control fear.
—George Bancroft

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
—Michel Foucault (French Philosopher)

Sow a thought, reap an act; Sow an act, reap a habit; Sow a habit, reap a character; Sow a character, reap adestiny.
—Anonymous

If you take risks, you may fail. But if you don’t take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.
—Roberto Goizueta (Cuban Businessperson)

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of “work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
—Andy Warhol (American Painter)

As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.
—Joan Baez (American Singer)

How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really considered a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affectation is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.
—Charles G. Dawes (American Head of State)

I’ve never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn’t prepared and didn’t have the whole program worked out.
—Ted Turner (American Businessperson)

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
—Philip K. Dick (American Novelist)

Look before you leap; see before you go.
—Thomas Tusser

You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.
—Nancie J. Carmody

Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
—Unknown

Healthy personalities accept themselves not in any self-idolizing way, but in the sense that they see themselves as persons who are worth giving to another and worthy to receive from another.
—William Glasser (American Psychiatrist)

I couldn’t wait for success… so I went ahead without it.
—Jonathan Winters (American Comedian)

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them
—Gail Godwin (American Novelist)

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.
—Han Suyin (Chinese-born Eurasian Novelist)

Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
—Vita Sackville-West (English Gardener)

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
—Alberto Giacometti (Swiss Sculptor)

Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
—Carl Rogers (American Psychologist)

People go through four stages before any revolutionary development:|1. It’s nonsense, don’t waste my time.|2. It’s interesting, but not important.|3. I always said it was a good idea.|4. I thought of it first.
—Arthur C. Clarke (British Author)

There are five tests of the evidence of education—correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection; efficiency or the power to do.
—Nicholas Murray Butler (American Philosopher)

Power? It’s like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
—Harold Macmillan (British Head of State)

In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.
—Harold Macmillan (British Head of State)

We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive; but the very fact we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing practice.
—Louise Hay (American Author)

No one knows what they’ll do in a moment of crisis and hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
—Joan Baez (American Singer)

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don’t despise it. But it can’t quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.
—Georges Bernanos (French Author)

All fair in love and war.
—Francis Edward Smedley

Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering—because you can’t take it in all at once.
—Audrey Hepburn (Belgian-born British Actor)

You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

You ought to be true for the sake of the folks who think you are true. You never should stoop to a deed that your folks think you would not do. If you are false to yourself, be the blemish but small, you have injured your folks; you have been false to them all.
—Edgar Guest (English-born American Poet)

The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
—Edwin Markham (American Poet)

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
—George Marshall (American Military Leader)

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
—Colin Wilson (British Philosopher)

Laboring toward distant aims set the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best.
—Charles Henry Parkhurst (American Clergyman)

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
—Lynda Barry (American Cartoonist)

Give wind and tide a chance to change.
—Richard Evelyn Byrd (American Aviator)

One cannot expect to coast along and rise automatically to the top, no matter what friends you may have in the company. There may have been a time when, in large corporations, a person could rise simply because he had a stock interest or because he had friends in top management. That’s not true today. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
—David Rockefeller (American Philanthropist)

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.
—B. H. Liddell Hart (English Historian)

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
—Adam Smith (Scottish Philosopher)

To sleep is an act of faith
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (American Journalist)

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.
—Dorothea Brande (American Writer)

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
—Abigail Adams (American First Lady)

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
—Anne Sullivan Macy (American Educator)

There should be no inferiors and no superiors for true world friendship.
—Carlos P. Romulo (Philippine Diplomat)