Right Attitudes

I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.
—Michael Palin (English Actor, Writer, Television Traveler)

Human it is to have compassion on the unhappy.
—Giovanni Boccaccio (Italian Writer, Poet)

In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.
—John of the Cross (Spanish Roman Catholic Mystic)

Real life seems to have no plots.
—Ivy Compton-Burnett (English Novelist)

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.
—Anthony Hopkins (Welsh-American Actor)

If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
—Charles Sanders Peirce (American Philosopher)

A mind fallow becomes overgrown with the weeds of confusion and forgetfulness.
—Mick Burns (American Clergyman)

We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will have to be that, as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.
—Desmond Morris (English Ethologist, Writer)

I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.
—Alan Greenspan (American Economist)

If you want to know about a man you can find out an awful lot by looking at who he married.
—Kirk Douglas (American Actor)

Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.
—George Steiner (American Culture Critic)

Always give in charity to people of good conduct.
—The Jataka Tales (Genre of Buddhist Literature)

He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
—M. C. Escher (Dutch Artist)

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
—Russell Baker (American Journalist, Humorist)

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.
—Vanessa Redgrave (British Actress)

Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should do, they never get around to what they want to do.
—Kathleen Winsor (American Novelist)

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
—Frederick Douglass (American Abolitionist)

Good has but one enemy, the evil; but the evil has two enemies, the good and itself.
—Johannes von Muller (Swiss Historian)

Facts that challenge basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.
—Daniel Kahneman (American-Israeli Psychologist, Economist)

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.
—Willie Nelson (American Country Musician)

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and intruded depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.
—John Hope Franklin (American Historian)

The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
—Bruce Lee (American Martial Artist)

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic he isn’t.
—Bert Williams (American Entertainer)

We should not lose ourselves in vainglorious sohemes for changing human nature all over the planet. Rather, we should learn to view ourselves with a sense of proportion and Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given us to live.
—George F. Kennan (American Diplomat, Historian)

Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.
—Francois Mauriac (French Novelist)

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.
—Queen Elizabeth II (Queen of United Kingdom)

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what’s said and what’s done.
—Seamus Heaney (Irish Poet, Playwright)

The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of.
—Charles Henry Parkhurst (American Clergyman)