Right Attitudes

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)

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)