Right Attitudes

It is a bitter disappointment when you have sown benefits, to reap injuries.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus) (Roman Comic Playwright)

There seems to be no end to the senseless wickedness done on this little planet in a minor solar system, and we puny mortals appear to be decreasing in importance so far as the universe is concerned.
—Alec Guinness (English Actor)

My play was a complete success. The audience was a failure.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Playwright)

It’s comforting to use someone else’s priorities to guide our work. It lets us off the hook. But the only way to do our best work is to realize that part of what it means to do our work is to own the priorities as well. Your boat, your compass.
—Seth Godin (American Entrepreneur)

A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly.
—Homer (Ancient Greek Poet)

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (American Psychiatrist)

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.
—Winthrop W. Aldrich (American Banker, Diplomat)

I learned that if you want to make it bad enough, no matter how bad it is, you can make it.
—Gale Sayers (American Football Player)

Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. His reasoning can be mistaken, wrong, misled and sometimes fallacious. But he is liable to correction because reason is the guiding star of his life. But mere faith and blind faith is dangerous: it dulls the brain, and makes a man reactionary.
—Bhagat Singh (Indian Revolutionary)

You have to know exactly what you want out of your career. If you want to be a star, you don’t bother with other things.
—Marilyn Horne (American Opera Singer)

A raised weight can produce work, but in doing so it must necessarily sink from its height, and, when it has fallen as deep as it can fall, its gravity remains as before, but it can no longer do work.
—Hermann von Helmholtz (German Physiologist)

The principles now implanted in thy bosom will grow, and one day reach maturity; and in that maturity thou wilt find thy heaven or thy hell.
—R. David Thomas (American Entrepreneur)

A believer is a songless bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wings.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic)

If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.
—Arabic Proverb

Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.
—James E. Burke (American Business Executive)

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
—Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Founder of the Turkish Republic)

Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
—Christopher Isherwood (Anglo-American Novelist, Playwright)

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.
—Soong Mei-ling (Chinese Political Figure)

The job of arguing with the umpire belongs to the manager, because it won’t hurt the team if he gets thrown out of the game.
—Earl Weaver (American Baseball Player, Manager)

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
—William C. Dement (American Sleep Researcher)

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
—Ralph Ellison (American Novelist)

We can make inspired guesses, but we don’t know for certain what physical and chemical properties of the planet’s crust, its ocean, and its atmosphere made it so conducive to such a sudden appearance of life …
—Isaac Asimov (American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist)

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (English Poet)

When people have nothing, all they want is a handful of grains.
When they become wealthy, they treat the world like a straw.
Material objects by themselves are not great or worthless.
It is the fluctuating fortune of people that makes things appear big or small.
—Bhartrihari (Hindu Philosopher, Grammarian)

Ask thy purse what thou should spend.
—Scottish Proverb

I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.
—N. R. Narayana Murthy (Indian Businessperson)