Right Attitudes

There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, therefore it is good.” The other says, “This is new, therefore it is better.”
—William Ralph Inge (English Anglican Clergyman)

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly…and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.
—Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese Diarist, Novelist)

We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.
—John Lancaster Spalding (American Catholic Clergyman)

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
—Arthur Ashe (American Tennis Player)

Try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.
—Andrew Grove (Hungarian-born American Businessperson)

Nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves.
—Miguel Angel Ruiz (Mexican Spiritualist Author)

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
—Ralph Washington Sockman (American United Methodist Pastor)

Patience in adversity, magnanimity in ascendancy, eloquence in assembly, bravery in battle, aspiration for eminence and engrossment in the scriptures are the self-evident attributes of great men.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
—Ivan Illich (Austrian Philosopher)

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
—George Santayana (Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher)

An honest God is the noblest work of man.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic)

The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
—Jacques Barzun (American Cultural Historian)

HISTORY: gossip well told.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
—Samuel Butler

Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
—Collis Potter Huntington (American Industrialist)

Show me the man who would go to heaven alone, and I will show you one who will never be admitted there.
—Owen Feltham (English Essayist)

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of God on his world about us.—He has inscribed his thoughts in these marvellous hieroglyphics which sense and science have, these many thousand years, been seeking to understand.
—Theodore Parker (American Unitarian Preacher)

Life can and does turn on a dime. One little rotation of the wheel of fortune, and we’re no longer feeling so on top of life and impervious to change.
—Sharon Salzberg (Buddhist Teacher)

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Half-knowledge is very communicable; not so knowledge.
—Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (British Poet, Novelist)

Joy is the happiness of love—love aware of its own inner happiness. Pleasure comes from without, and joy comes from within, and it is, therefore, within reach of everyone in the world.
—Fulton J. Sheen (American Catholic Religious Leader)

Anger is the root of anxiety and mental distress. It is anger that keeps people bound to a worldly life. It even destroys righteous qualities. Therefore, put away your anger.
—Adhyatma Ramayana (Hindu Religious Text)

People must know that their ideas will be listened to and, if they have merit, acted upon. If they do, it is possible to mobilize individual creativity on a very broad scale.
—James A. Champy (American Business Consultant)

The secret of Love is the joy of self-giving.
The secret of joy is self-giving. If any part in you is without joy, it means that it has not given itself, it wants to keep itself for itself.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
—Luigi Pirandello (Italian Dramatist)

Getting even with somebody is no way to get ahead of anybody.
—Cullen Hightower (American Humorist)

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
—Blaise Cendrars (Swiss Poet, Writer)

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage—he won’t encounter many rivals.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Philosopher, Physicist)

We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)

Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.
—Arabic Proverb

Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
—Marva Collins (American Educator)

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.
—Jodi Picoult (American Novelist)

They… threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this—animated, but collateral.
—Rose Macaulay (British Author)

Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience.
—Paul Boese

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
—Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British Philosopher)

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

In ancient times, do you think that there was not the ignorant, and the shallow minded? And why after all should you embrace so fondly a carcass of dead thoughts. Live in the present and shape the future, do not be casting lingering looks to the distant past for the past has passed away, never again to return.
—Subramanya Bharathi (Indian Tamil Poet)

Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
—Dan Millman (American Children’s Books Writer)

Quarrels often arise in marriages when the bridal gifts are excessive.
—Ausonius (Latin Poet, Rhetorician)

Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.
—Russell Banks (American Author)

The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one’s neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out.
—John Shelby Spong (American Episcopal Bishop)

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it… it’s just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)

Lift up your worries and ask for grace to get through the rest of the day.
—Sarah Ban Breathnach (American Self-help Author)

Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything He has commanded.
—Dwight L. Moody (Christian Religious Leader)

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in a striving toward an important goal.
—Maxwell Maltz (American Surgeon)

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)