Right Attitudes

It requires strength of character to act upon one’s ideas; it requires no less strength of character to resist being seduced by them.
—Irving Kristol (American Political Writer)

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.
—Jack Welch (American Businessperson)

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (American Academic, Politician)

Even a crust is bread.
—Finnish Proverb

I live on hope, and that I think do all who come into this world.
—Robert Bridges (English Poet)

One of the most important factors, not only in military matters but in life as a whole, is . . the ability to direct one’s whole energies towards the fulfillment of a particular task.
—Erwin Rommel (German Field Marshal)

Look at children. Of course they may quarrel, but generally speaking they do not harbor ill feelings as much or as long as adults do. Most adults have the advantage of education over children, but what is the use of an education if they show a big smile while hiding negative feelings deep inside? Children don’t usually act in such a manner. If they feel angry with someone, they express it, and then it is finished. They can still play with that person the following day.
—The 14th Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Religious Leader)

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
—Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (German Man of Letters)

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid… He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
—Raymond Chandler (American Novelist)

If you want to be truly successful invest in yourself to get the knowledge you need to find your unique factor. When you find it and focus on it and persevere your success will blossom.
—Sidney Madwed (American Poet, Author, Public Speaker)

Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform, and mortal men lay hold on heaven.
—Edward Young (English Poet)

To me, acting is the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves. To my way of thinking, an actor’s course is set even before he’s out of the cradle.
—James Dean (American Film Actor)

Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.
—Peter Matthiessen (American Naturalist, Novelist)

We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.
—Tobias Wolff (American Author)

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.
—Ann Patchett (American Novelist)

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.
—George Dawson (English Preacher, Activist)

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.
—Jacques Cousteau (French Underwater Explorer)

The hard-core intentionalist expresses only the most remote concern for consequences—usually, some vague, distant utopia. But this is, in most cases, a rationalization. His real satisfaction comes from a sense of doing the right thing—even when right has, in his mind, no clear connection with reality.
—Robert Bidinotto (American Novelist, Journalist)

In the maxim of the past you cannot go anywhere.
—Maxim Gorky (Russian Writer)

No man can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. If I do not find in a book something which I am looking for, or am ready to receive, then the book is no book for me however much it may be for another man.
—Noah Porter (American Clergyman)

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
—Jonathan Haidt (American Social Psychologist)

You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream, you’ve got to get out there and make it happen yourself.
—Diana Ross (American Singer, Actress)

Your prayer must be for a sound mind in a sound body.
—Juvenal (Roman Poet)

When you tame and domesticate the divine it loses its danger and it’s power to forgive you, make you happy, or its power to challenge you, and call you towards new growth.
—John O’Donohue (Irish Philosopher, Priest)

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) (English Novelist)

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.
—William Bernbach (American Advertising Executive)

Glamour is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it.
—Marlene Dietrich (German-American Actress, Singer)

Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream.
—John Sutherland Bonnell (American Preacher)

Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great, generous, and true; without it, we are little, false, and mean.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon (English Poet, Novelist)

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

If a man considers that he is born, he cannot avoid the fear of death. Let him find out if he has been born or if the Self has any birth. He will discover that the Self always exists, that the body that is born resolves itself into thought and that the emergence of thought is the root of all mischief. Find from where thoughts emerge. Then you will be able to abide in the ever-present inmost Self and be free from the idea of birth or the fear of death.
—Ramana Maharshi (Indian Hindu Mystic)