Right Attitudes

Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt.
—Anthony Bourdain (American Chef, TV Personality)

The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.
—Herodotus (Ancient Greek Historian)

Always remember, money isn’t everything—but also remember to make a lot of it before talking such fool nonsense.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
—Henry Miller (American Novelist)

Public opinion is always in advance of the law.
—John Galsworthy (English Novelist, Playwright)

It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
—Owen Feltham (English Essayist)

Those who have succeeded at anything and don’t mention luck are kidding themselves.
—Larry King (American TV Personality)

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.
—George S. Patton (American Military Leader)

What people with disabilities want is to relate. This is something unique. It makes people who are closed up in the head become human. The wonderful thing about people with disabilities is that when someone important comes, they don’t care. They care about the relationship. So they have a healing power, a healing power of love.
—Jean Vanier (French-Canadian Humanitarian)

Hope not for impossibilities.
—Thomas Fuller (English Cleric, Historian)

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E. B. White (American Essayist, Humorist)

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.
—Peter Medawar (British Immunologist, Writer)

Two are an army against one.
—Icelandic Proverb

It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood—no more—to man, and love to a woman is life or death.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox (American Poet, Journalist)

Take risks … be willing to put your mind and your spirit, your time and your energy, your stomach and your emotions on the line. To search for a safe place, to search for an end to a rainbow, is to search for a place that you will hate once you find it. The soul must be nourished along with the bank account and the resume. The best nourishment for any soul is to create your own risks.
—Jim Lehrer (American Television Journalist)

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.
—Dante Alighieri (Italian Poet, Philosopher)

Cheerful looks make every dish a feast; and it is that which crowns a welcome.
—Philip Massinger (English Playwright)

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
—Annie Dillard (American Writer)

Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
—Bruce Lee (American Martial Artist)

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.
—Remy de Gourmont (French Poet, Writer)

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
—Margaret Fuller (American Journalist, Feminist)

There is no prison like a guilty conscience.
—Welsh Proverb

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of. It’s an ongoing process.
—Sharon Salzberg (Buddhist Teacher)

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
—Leo Aikman (American Columnist, Humorist)

The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the sitting.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore (American Investor)

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American Humanitarian)

Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.
—Jonathan Miller (English Stage Director)

Virtue is the first title of nobility.
—Moliere (French Playwright)

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
—Carl Gustav Jung (Swiss Psychologist)

I think there is something, more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers, there aren’t enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision.
—W. Clement Stone (American Self-help Guru)

Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told—on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others—there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change—passing on the fire like a torch—forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all.
—Tanith Lee (British Science Fiction Writer)

Many men build as cathedrals were built, the part nearest the ground finished; but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete.
—Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)

Mankind must destroy anti-humanity before it becomes extinct itself.
—John Hersey (American Novelist, Journalist)

Money is a tool—know how much is enough.
—Brad Feld (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

Life is not to live, but to be well.
—Martial (Ancient Roman Latin Poet)

Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
—Anthony de Mello (Indian-born American Theologian)

Our own faults are those we are the first to detect, and the last to forgive, in others.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon (English Poet, Novelist)

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.
—Ivan Turgenev (Russian Novelist, Playwright)