Right Attitudes

Pay as little attention to discouragement as possible. Plough ahead as a steamer does, rough or smooth—rain or shine. To carry your cargo and make your port is the point.
—Maltbie Davenport Babcock (American Clergyman)

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
—Aldo Leopold (American Conservationist)

It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
—Deng Xiaoping (Chinese Statesman)

The best way to lose weight is to put the handle of the fridge two inches from the ground.
—Dawn French (Welsh Comedienne, Actress)

Right action is not a fixed right action, it is an action that is conditioned by love and respect. It is an action that considers the consequences of our actions in terms of whether or not they cause suffering.
—Martine Batchelor (French Buddhist Teacher)

The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake.
—Alan Greenspan (American Economist)

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
—Marcel Proust (French Novelist)

Even the bitterest words that people say to one another seldom seem as divisive as the unspoken words that one expects from the other in vain.
—Hans Carossa (German Novelist)

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
—Stephen Fry (English Actor, Writer)

Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.
—Zen Proverb (Japanese School of Mahayana Buddhism)

When the adulation of life is gone, the coward sneaks to his death, but the brave live on.
—George Sewell (English Physician, Poet)

Wisdom is one thing, to know how to make true judgment, how all things are steered through all things.
—Heraclitus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

A great writer is the friend and benefactor of his readers.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (English Writer, Politician)

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
—Yann Martel (Canadian Novelist)

Successful careers are those that realize in the man the dreams of the child.
—Wallace Stevens (American Poet)

Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.
—Donna Tartt (American Novelist)

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet; and amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog has made an alliance with us.
—Max De Pree (American Businessman)

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
—Michelangelo (Italian Painter)

Pain was their body’s way of telling them that they’d pushed themselves to their limits—which was exactly where they were supposed to be.
—Richard Marcinko (American Navy Officer)

Ignorance is not merely a deficiency of knowledge but, in addition, it positively apprehends reality in a distinctive way. And being a distorted mode of conception, it creates a view of the world that is in opposition to, and in conflict with, the actual way the world is.
—Stephen Batchelor (British Buddhist Author, Teacher)

A man’s doubts and fears are his worst enemies.
—William Wrigley, Jr. (American Businessman)