Right Attitudes

This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the truth, and the truth is the cure. . . . A sick man is like a criminal cast into prison for disobeying some law that man has set up. I plead his case, and if I get the verdict, the criminal is set at liberty. If I fail, I lose the case. His own judgment is his judge, his feelings are his evidence. If my explanation is satisfactory to the judge, you will give me the verdict. This ends the trial, and the patient is released.
—Phineas Quimby

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.
—Enoch Powell (British Politician)

A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—John Burroughs (American Naturalist, Writer)

No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
—Liberty Hyde Bailey (American Botanist)

There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.
—Soichiro Honda (Japanese Inventor)

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates (American Novelist)

I shall not let a sorrow die until I find the heart of it, nor let a wordless joy go by until it talks to me a bit.
—Sara Teasdale (American Poet)

People come to Washington believing it’s the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to the engine.
—Richard N. Goodwin (American Writer)

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
—Queen Elizabeth I (British Monarch)

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Each person is an idiom… an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
—Gordon Allport (American Psychologist)

Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
—Patricia Neal (American Actress)

Most of us are honest all the time, and all of us are honest most of the time.
—Charles Mathias (American Politician)

How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement—no matter how temporary.
—Craig Thompson (American Artist)

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. … When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
—Khaled Hosseini (Afghan-American Author)

In our dreams we are always young.
—Sarah Louise Delany (American Educator, Author)

The people that set one animal against another haven’t the guts to be bullies themselves. They’re just secondhand cowards.
—Cleveland Amory (American Animal Rights Activist)

Failure is often God’s own tool for carving some of the finest outlines in the character of his children; and, even in this life, bitter and crushing failures have often in them the germs of new and quite unimagined happiness.
—Thomas Hodgkin (English Physician)

Whoever says he knows that immortality is a fact is merely hoping that it is.
—Carl Clinton Van Doren (American Critic, Historian)

I don’t know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do.
—Alain-Rene Lesage (French Novelist, Dramatist)

A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents.
—Herbert Hoover (American Statesman)

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.
—Ted Kennedy (American Politician)

If a door slams shut it means that God is pointing to an open door further on down.
—Anna Delaney Peale (American Author)

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Playwright)

Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.
—Socrates (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.
—Doris Kearns Goodwin (American Historian)

We can easily manage, if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed for it.—But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow to the weight before we are required to bear it.
—John Newton (English Clergyman, Writer)

They made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
—Frank Herbert (American Science-fiction Writer)

And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After death has stopped the ears.
—A. E. Housman (English Scholar, Poet)

A scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than another scientist’s definitions.
—Murray Gell-Mann (American Physicist)

Man is born good by nature, only to later become a beast because of the Society.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
—Joko Beck (American Zen Teacher)

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
—Paul Hawken (American Environmentalist)

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.
—Robert Anton Wilson (American Polymath)

In the democratic western countries, so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of “freedom,” like a bastard brother of reform.
—Wyndham Lewis (British Artist, Writer)

Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.
—Alice Stone Blackwell (American Suffragist)

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
—Czeslaw Milosz (Polish-American Poet, Novelist)