Right Attitudes

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.
—Dwight Morrow (American Businessman, Diplomat)

No doing without some ruing.
—Sigrid Undset (Norwegian Novelist)

Beauty in the flesh will continue to rule the world.
—Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. (American Theatre Manager)

The day I become content is the day I cease to be anything more than a man who hit home runs.
—Hank Aaron (American Baseball Player)

Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn’t so.
—Charles Bukowski (American Writer)

A library is where you meet fascinating characters you never forget.
—Judy Blume (American Author)

There’s been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.
—Michael Pollan (American Food Writer)

The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.
—George Moore (Irish Writer)

It is very very difficult to lift the rock till the peak of the mountain. But it’s very very easy to get the same rock from the peak to the mountain foot. In the same way it is very difficult task to induce noble thoughts in to a person’s mind and to make him/her a good individual. But it’s far more simple to induce bad habits in a person.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)

Charity ain’t giving people what you wants to give, it’s giving people what they need to get.
—Terry Pratchett (English Fantasy Writer)

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn’t she behave like a nice man?
—Edith Evans (English Actress)

It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman.
—Tallulah Bankhead (American Actress)

It’s a terribly hard job to spend a billion dollars and get your money’s worth.
—George M. Humphrey (American Lawyer)

When fortune empties her chamber pot on your head, smile and say We are going to have a summer shower.
—John A. Macdonald (Canadian Statesman)

The worst possible outlook is indifference that says, ‘I can’t do anything about it; I’ll just get by.’ Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to feel outraged. That freedom is indispensable, as is the political involvement that goes with it.
—Stephane Hessel (French Diplomat, Writer, Concentration Camp Surviv)

No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time—but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.
—Charles Erwin Wilson (American Businessperson)

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
—Yuval Noah Harari (Israeli Historian)

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian Poet)

There is a difference between desire and desperation.
—Tyra Banks (American Supermodel)

No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics.
—Franz Boas (American Anthropologist)

The greatest gift you and your partner can give your children is the example of an intimate, healthy, and loving relationship.
—Barbara De Angelis (American Psychologist)

Justice is incidental to law and order.
—J. Edgar Hoover (American Government Official)

The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

No race can prosper ’til it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the field, as in writing a poem.
—Booker T. Washington (African-American Educationist)

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
—H. L. Mencken (American Journalist, Literary Critic)

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
—E. O. Wilson (American Sociobiologist)

A beautiful young lady is an act of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art.
—Louis Nizer (American Lawyer, Author)

A tyrannical sultan is better than constant anarchy.
—Egyptian Proverb

Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.
—Albert Memmi (Tunisian Novelist)

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable byproduct of all virtuous endeavor.
—Reinhold Niebuhr (American Theologian)

The dog in the kennel barks at his fleas; the dog that hunts does not feel them.
—Chinese Proverb

Success is transient, evanescent. The real passion lies in the poignant acquisition of knowledge about all the shading and subtleties of the creative secrets.
—Konstantin Stanislavski (Russian Actor)

For hope is but the dream of those that wake.
—Matthew Prior (English Poet, Diplomat)

When one is happy there is no time to be fatigued; being happy engrosses the whole attention.
—E. F. Benson (English Novelist, Biographer)

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
—John W. Gardner (American Activist)

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists … in the loved one, perfection.
—Sidney Poitier (American Actor, Film Director)

Grace is something you can never get but only be given.
—Frederick Buechner (American Writer, Theologian)

He that forgets his friend is ungrateful to him; but he that forgets his Saviour is unmerciful to himself.
—John Bunyan (English Writer, Preacher)

Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.
—Jane Goodall (British Ethologist)

Youth loves honor and victory more than money.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
—Marion Milner (‘Joanna Field’) (British Psychoanalyst)

One should have the greatest simplicity of physical habits combined with the largest flexibility. How hard the combination is to attain, and yet how important to a life at once sane and full! It is the same problem present everywhere in living—the problem of unstable equilibrium—of an adjustment that is ever in process and never crystallized.
—Edward Howard Griggs (American Lecturer, Educator)

Let none be rich, and Poverty
Would not be thought so great a Misery.
Our discontent is from comparison;
Were better states unseen, each man would like his own.
—John Norris (British Priest, Philosopher)