Right Attitudes

The human heart in its perversity finds it hard to escape hatred and revenge.
—Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Italian Jewish Rabbi)

My chief task has been to conquer fear. The public sees only the thrill of the accomplished trick; they have no conception of the tortuous preliminary self-training that was necessary to conquer fear… no one except myself can appreciate how I have to work at this job every single day, never letting up for a moment. I always have on my mind the thought that next year I must do something greater, something more wonderful.
—Harry Houdini (Hungarian-born American Magician)

The mill wheel turns, it turns forever, though what is uppermost remains not so.
—Bertolt Brecht (German Poet)

Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.
—Walt Whitman (American Poet)

It’s a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.
—J. K. Rowling (British Children’s Books Writer)

Those who are prepared to die for any cause are seldom defeated.
—Jawaharlal Nehru (Indian Head of State)

A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
—Chinese Proverb

The cause of most of man’s unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.
—Gordon B. Hinckley (American Mormon Religious Leader)

An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen, but greatens, his life.
—Stephen Samuel Wise (American Jewish Rabbi)

There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.
—William S. Burroughs (American Novelist)

Men, whose trade is rat-catching, love to catch rats; the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; and the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice.
—Sydney Smith (English Anglican Writer)

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity: nothing is better than simplicity.
—Walt Whitman (American Poet)

Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man.
—Victor Hugo (French Novelist)

It’s okay if you mess up. You should give yourself a break.
—Billy Joel (American Singer)

A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
—John Milton (English Poet)

An act of God was defined as something which no reasonable man could have expected.
—A. P. Herbert (English Humorist)

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
—Barbara Kingsolver (American Novelist)

I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
—Wernher von Braun (German-born American Engineer)

Open your mouth and purse cautiously, and your stock of wealth and reputation shall, at least in repute, be great.
—Johann Jacob Zimmermann (German Nonconformist Theologian)

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
—Marlene Dietrich (German-born American Actor)

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments.
—Edwin Percy Whipple (American Essayist)

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

Confidence … is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
—John Dewey (American Philosopher)

However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.
—Henry Fielding (English Novelist)

Someday change will be accepted as life itself.
—Shirley MacLaine (American Actor)

What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.
—Edwin Percy Whipple (American Essayist)

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.
—John D. MacDonald (American Novelist)

A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
—Thomas Mann (German Novelist)

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.
—Reynolds Price (American Novelist)

He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit from both sides.
—George P. Shultz (American Economist)

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
—William Styron (American Novelist)

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.
—Shirley MacLaine (American Actor)

Friendship doesn’t exist to criticize but to inspire confidence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

Common sense and good nature will do a lot to make the pilgrimage of life not too difficult.
—W. Somerset Maugham (French Playwright)

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
—Igor Stravinsky (Russian-born American Composer)

Man is not on the earth solely for his own happiness. He is there to realize great things for humanity.
—Vincent van Gogh (Dutch Painter)

Are great things ever done smoothly? Time, patience, and indomitable will must show.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.
—William S. Burroughs (American Novelist)

Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I’m not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
—William Saroyan (American Novelist)

I was made to work. If you are equally industrious, you will be equally successful.
—Johann Sebastian Bach (German Composer)

Perhaps the best test of a man’s intelligence is his capacity for making a summary.
—Lytton Strachey (British Biographer)

Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we might have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do.
—Gian Carlo Menotti (Italian-born American Composer)

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss Philosopher)

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.
—Karl Barth (Swiss Reformed Theologian)

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
—Jean Sibelius (Finnish Composer)

The art of teaching is tolerance. Humbleness is the art of learning.
—B. K. S. Iyengar (Indian Hindu Yoga Teacher)

Without constancy there is neither love, friendship, nor virtue in the world.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

If you would walk the way of love, never feel hurt nor yield to anger, but accept pain as a part of life.
—J. P. Vaswani (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.
—William Ralph Inge (English Anglican Clergyman)

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
—Amos Bronson Alcott (American Teacher)

The desire for the well-being of one’s own nation can be—and must be—made compatible with the welfare of all humanity.
—Louis Leo Snyder (American-born German Scholar)

Words once printed assume a life of their own.
—Wilma Askinas

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
—E. F. Schumacher (German Mathematician)

Better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad.
—Christina Rossetti (English Poet)

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
—Hannah Arendt (German Political Theorist)

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
—Louise Erdrich (American Children’s Books Writer)

To believe a business impossible is the way to make it so. How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
—Jeremy Collier (English Anglican Theater Critic)

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
—Jonathan Swift (Irish Satirist)

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
—Bob Dylan (American Singer)

Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
—Iris Murdoch (English Novelist)

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
—Igor Stravinsky (Russian-born American Composer)

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German Lutheran Pastor)

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic)

What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
—David Foster Wallace (American Novelist)

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
—Eugene O’Neill (American Playwright)