Right Attitudes

If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.
—Francis of Assisi (Italian Monk)

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
—Frank O’Hara (American Poet, Art Critic)

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
—Frederic Chopin (Polish Composer, Pianist)

There can be no liberty that isn’t earned.
—Robert R. Young (American Financier)

Regret not that which is past; and trust not to thine own righteousness.
—Anthony of Padua (Portuguese Friar)

Argument, again, is the death of conversation, if carried on in a spirit of hostility.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.
—Eugene Ionesco (French Dramatist)

Adversity reminds men of religion.
—Livy (Titus Livius) (Roman Historian)

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
—Thomas Paine (American Nationalist)

Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.
—Nawal El Saadawi (Egyptian Writer, Activist)

I get it now; I didn’t get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible…and enjoying everything in between.
—Mia Farrow (American Actress, Activist)

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.
—Khaled Hosseini (Afghan-American Author)

Where duty is plain delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may be both wisdom and safety.
—Tryon Edwards (American Theologian)

Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.
—Hervey Allen (American Author)

When a man is kind to dumb animals, I always say he has got some good in him.
—Owen Wister (American Novelist)

To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.
—Charles Lindbergh (American Aviator, Conservationist)

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the Mystery.
—Ram Dass (American Hindu New Age Pioneer)

Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin.
—Mary Baker Eddy (American Christian Science Religious Leader)

Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbors.
—Rudyard Kipling (British Children’s Books Writer)

Love can’t mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That’s the only real path to love.
—Leon Uris (American Writer)

Not the fruit of experience but experience itself, is the end.
—Walter Pater (English Critic, Essayist)

It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
—Dolores Ibarruri (Spanish Communist Leader)

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.
—Charles Spurgeon (English Baptist Preacher)

There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.
—Edwin Markham (American Poet)

All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
—J. R. R. Tolkien (British Philologist, Writer)

In doing what we ought we deserve no praise, because it is our duty.
—Augustine of Hippo (Roman-African Christian Philosopher)

What a woman says to her avid lover should be written in wind and running water.
—Catullus (Roman Latin Poet)

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.
—Florence King (American Essayist)

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
—Cecil Day-Lewis (British Poet, Critic)

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.
—Celia Thaxter (American Poet)

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
—Dorothea Lange (American Photographer)

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.
—Cyril Connolly (British Literary Critic)

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
—William Cowper (English Anglican Poet)

Thinking should become your capital asset, whatever ups and downs you may come across in your life.
—A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (Indian Head of State, Scientist)

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Dutch Politician, Activist)

When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority.
—Chuck Swindoll (American Christian Pastor)

Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite; and this rare conjuncture, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant.
—Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (French Writer, Statesman)