quotes

2008-04-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

Albert Einstein:

How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

Albert Schweitzer:

Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us], but allow [us] really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.â€�

Alfred Adler:

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.

Alfred Tennyson:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Allan K. Chalmers:

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Ambrose Bierce:

Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.

Amy Bloom:

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

Amy Tan:

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

Anais Nin:

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Ann Landers:

If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

Barbara De Angelis:

Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.

Barbara De Angelis:

Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.

Bayard Rustin:

When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.

Bayard Taylor:

I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars grow old...

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted

Bertrand Russell:

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

Bible:

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
I Corinthians 13:4-8

Blaise Pascal:

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

C.S. Lewis:

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.

Carl Jung:

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:

Tell me who admires and loves you,
And I will tell you who you are.

Dale Evans:

Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.

Denis Waitley:

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Don Byas:

You call it madness, but I call it love.

E.M. Forster:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...

Ecclesiastes:

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I love humanity but I hate people.

Elbert Hubbard:

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)

Elie Wiesel:

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elizabeth Barret Browning:

Whoso loves, believes the impossible.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Emily Dickinson:

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.

Emily Dickinson:

Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—

Emily Dickinson:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.

Emma Goldman:

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.

Erich Fromm:

Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Ernest Becker:

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Euripides:

He is not a lover who does not love forever.

Felix Adler:

Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.

Francis David:

We need not think alike to love alike.

Franklin P. Jones:

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

George MacDonald:

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

George Sand:

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

George Santayana:

Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

Goethe:

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.

H. L. Mencken:

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Prejudices, 1919

HH the Dalai Lama:

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]:

...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget.
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology

Helen Keller:

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

Henri Nouwen:

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

Henry David Thoreau:

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Henry David Thoreau:

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.

Herman Hesse:

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

Hermann Hesse:

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

Hobbes (of Calvin and ...):

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.

Houssaye:

Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.

Ingrid Bergman:

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

Iris Murdock:

We can only learn to love by loving.

Isha McKenzie-Mavinga:

On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.

James Baldwin:

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Another Country, 1962

James D. Bryden:

Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.

James Thurber and E.B. White:

Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.

Jane Austen:

Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.

Jane Austen:

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.

Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Jeanne Moreau:

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.

Jessamyn West:

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962

Jimi Hendrix:

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

Joan Vinge:

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
The Snow Queen

John Lennon:

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

Jonathan Swift:

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Karl Menninger:

Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

W.H. Murray

Katharine Hepburn:

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Lily Tomlin:

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

Lisa Hoffman:

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

M. Scott Peck:

Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.

Madeleine de Scudery:

Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.

Marcel Proust:

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.

Margaret Anderson:

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

Margaret Guenther:

[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.

Mark Twain:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain:

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Mary Oliver:

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods

Mary Parrish:

Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.

Mary S. Calderone:

I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.

Matthew Arnold:

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

Mitsugi Saotome:

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Where there is love there is life.

Molleen Matsumura:

Love is like a campfire: It may be sparked quickly, and at first the kindling throws out a lot of heat, but it burns out quickly. For long lasting, steady warmth (with delightful bursts of intense heat from time to time), you must carefully tend the fire. (2007)

Molleen Matsumura:

Love is more than just a feeling: it's a process requiring continual attention. Loving well takes laughter, loyalty, and wanting more to be able to say, "I understand" than to hear, "You're right." (1999)

Molly Haskell:

But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.

Mother Teresa:

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

Mother Teresa:

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter

Norman Lindsay:

The best love affairs are those we never had.

Oscar Hammerstein, II:

Do you love me because I'm beautiful,
or am I am beautiful because you love me?

Oscar Wilde:

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Paul Tillich:

The first duty of love is to listen.

Pearl Bailey:

What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.

Pearl S. Buck:

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Pearl S. Buck:

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Rainer Maria Rilke:

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Robert Frost:

Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Birches

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

Robert Heinlein:

Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Roger de Bussy-Rabutin:

Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.

Rose Walker:

Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...

This entry continued ...
Roy Croft:

I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you
Love (first stanza)

Rumi:

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.

Rumi:

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi:

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.

Saint Francis de Sales:

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.

Samuel Butler:

Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh

Sharon Welch:

Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Simone Weil:

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"

Sir Arthur Pinero:

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.

Song of Solomon:

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Spanish proverb:

Where there is love, there is pain.

St. Augustine:

Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.

Søren Kierkegaard:

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Thomas Merton:

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

Tom Robbins:

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Still Life With Woodpecker

Truman Capote:

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948

Unknown:

Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

Ursula LeGuin:

Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Victor Frankl:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Hugo:

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

W.H. Murray:

...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition

Washington Irving:

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

Willa Cather:

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

Willa Cather:

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

William E. Gladstone :

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

William Shakespeare:

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

William Shakespeare:

Love all, trust a few.

William Shakespeare:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
"Romeo and Juliet"

William Sloane Coffin:

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr.:

Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.

William Wordsworth:

The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.

Zora Neale Hurston:

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Zora Neale Hurston:

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

2008-04-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

E. B. White:

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

Edward Gibbon:

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

Edward Gibbon:

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Edward Gibbon:

All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.

George Santayana:

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Jean Cocteau:

Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?

John Barrymore:

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.

John Lennon:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Lucille Ball:

Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work -- and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Seneca:

If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Thomas Jefferson:

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson (attributed):

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

2008-04-07T06:33:00.000-07:00

A. Powell Davies:

Life is just a chance to grow a soul.

A. Powell Davies:

Life is just a chance to grow a soul.

Abraham Lincoln:

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Adrienne Rich:

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Alan Bennett:

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Albert Einstein:

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

Albert Einstein:

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Albert Schweitzer:

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer:

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

Albert Schweitzer:

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949

Albert Schweitzer:

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Alice Walker:

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker:

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Amelia Burr:

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Anais Nin:

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin:

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin:

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anais Nin:

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Annie Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Barbara Kingsolver:

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Barry Lopez:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams

Ben Jonson:

A good life is a main argument.

Benjamin Disraeli:

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Franklin:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buckminster Fuller:

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Buddha:

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard:

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations"

Carl Jung:

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Sandburg:

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Carl Sandburg:

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Charlotte Bronte:

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Chinese proverb:

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

Colette:

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Colette:

Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Corita Kent:

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

E. B. White:

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"

Edith Wharton:

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Elbert Hubbard:

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard:

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986)

Elizabeth Drew:

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Emily Dickinson:

Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—

Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson:

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

Emily Dickinson:

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Ernest Becker:

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker:

[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

Ernest Becker:

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

F. Forrester Church:

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

Franklin P. Jones:

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Frederick Buechner:

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

George Bernard Shaw:

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

George Eliot:

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Sand:

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

George Santayana:

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Germaine Greer:

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

Goethe:

A useless life is an early death.

HH the Dalai Lama:

What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.

Harry Emerson Fosdick:

Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.

Helen Keller:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Henri Frederick Amiel:

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henry David Thoreau:

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Henry James:

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Henry Van Dyke:

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Isaac Asimov:

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isadora Duncan:

People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life.

James F. Bymes:

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Joan Baez:

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

John Dewey:

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey:

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

John Lennon:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Joni Mitchell:

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Katharine Hepburn:

Without discipline, there's no life at all.

Leo Buscaglia:

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Lord Byron:

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

Madame de Stael:

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

Marcus Aurelius:

The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius:

Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Marcus Aurelius:

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

Margaret Fuller:

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Maria Mitchell:

Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Service is what life is all about.

Marie Curie:

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Mark Twain:

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mark Twain:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain:

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy.

Mark Twain:

Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Mark Twain:

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Mary Oliver:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver:

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods

Matthew Arnold:

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

May Sarton:

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Where there is love there is life.

Mortimer Adler:

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously):

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.

The story behind this quotation

Norman MacEwan:

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Norman Vincent Peale:

Live your life and forget your age.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Omar N. Bradley:

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Oscar Wilde:

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Paul Anka:

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Paul Beattie:

When My Mind is Still

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I remember things too easily forgotten:
The purity of early love,
The maturity of unselfish love that asks --
desires -- nothing but another's good,
The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being.
It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety,
Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow
Because of these challenges to my essential being.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can sense my basic humanity,
And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters.
Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends.
If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them,
Then my life shall surely be richer and more full.
If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves,
And they will be more able to accept me.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I know how much life has given me:
The history of the race, friends and family,
The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself.
Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly,
With greater trust and joy,
With more profound seriousness and earnest service,
And yet more calmly at the heart of life.

Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements.

Paul Bowles:

... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Pearl S. Buck:

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Rabindranath Tagore:

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
from Gitanjali

Ralph Ellison:

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.:

Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.

Ray Bradbury:

Life is "trying things to see if they work."

Raymond Charles Barker:

The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.

Robert Byrne:

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Robert Frost:

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost:

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?

Robert Louis Stevenson:

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Roy H. Williams:

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

Sarah Ban Breathnach:

An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.

Sarah Bernhardt:

Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sean O'Casey:

I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.

Seneca:

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Sharon Welch:

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Sophia Lyon Fahs:

Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.

Stephen Covey:

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

Theodore Rubin:

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thomas Jefferson:

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Tom Lehrer:

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Toni Morrison:

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Unknown:

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Victor Frankl:

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Victor Frankl:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Frankl:

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

Victor Hugo:

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Virginia Satir:

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Wallace Stegner:

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Will Rogers:

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

William Blake:

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

William James:

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

William James:

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.
Is Life Worth Living?

Winston Churchill:

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Zeno:

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

2008-04-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

Albert Einstein:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.

Albert Einstein:

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Anais Nin:

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

Benjamin Jowett:

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted

Blaise Pascal:

We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Buckminster Fuller:

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Carl Jung:

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Rogers:

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Christopher Morley:

There was so much handwriting on the wall that even the wall fell down.

Christopher Morley:

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.

Dean William R. Inge:

The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.

Eden Phillpotts:

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Epictetus:

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

Goethe:

Knowing is not enough; we must apply!

Henri Bergson:

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Henry David Thoreau:

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Henry David Thoreau:

I was determined to know beans. Walden

Henry David Thoreau:

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Heraklietos of Ephesos:

Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

James Madison:

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

James Madison:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

John Adams:

The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of the rich men in the country.

John Dewey:

In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

Kahlil Gibran:

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Leonardo da Vinci:

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Malcolm Forbes:

The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

Margaret Fuller:

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Margaret Mead:

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

Maria Mitchell:

We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Mark Twain:

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
1908, notebook

Mark Twain:

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Mark van Doren:

Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better.

Martin Fischer:

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Paulo Freire:

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Pearl S. Buck:
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Peter F. Drucker:

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work -- on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself -- it must be organized for constant change.

Plato:

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Proverbs 17:28:

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

Rachel Carson:

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Great are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Richard Cecil:

The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Samuel Johnson :

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Stephen Jay Gould:

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Thomas H. Huxley:

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

Thomas H. Huxley:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Umberto Eco:

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Unknown:

The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are -- as soon as we quit pretending we're small or unholy.

Vernon Cooper:

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

William Golding:

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

William Shakespeare:

Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

William Shakespeare:

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

William Shakespeare:

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

2008-04-06T05:25:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Albert Einstein:

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

Albert Einstein:

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Albert Schweitzer:

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Albert Schweitzer:

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

Alex Carey:

... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.

Anatole France:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Aristotle:

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Barbara Strickland:

What I am proud of, what seems so simply clear, is that feminism is a way to fight for justice, always in short supply.

Benjamin Jowett:

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

Blaise Pascal:

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Charles Dickens:

Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.

Clarence Darrow:

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

David Kaczynski:

We've got to take back the ideal of justice, we've got to take back this principle of human dignity. We've got to take it back from vengeance, from hatred, we've got to say: look, we're all in this together. We are human beings.

Dolores Ibarruri:

It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Dom Helder Camara:

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

Earl Warren:

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Elie Wiesel:

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.

Eugene V. Debs:

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech

Frederick Douglass:

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Friedrich Von Schiller:

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

Gloria Steinem:

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel:

Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.

Hierocles:

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Hubert H. Humphrey:

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Isocrates:

The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.

Jane Addams:

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jimmy Carter:

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

John L. Lewis:

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Lane Kirkland:

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

Lya Sorano:

When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long.

Mac Morgan:

If we're going to end welfare, the rich should be the first to lose it.

Marian Wright Edelman:

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

Marian Wright Edelman:

It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

Marian Wright Edelman:

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

Marian Wright Edelman:

When Jesus Christ asked little children to come to him, he didn't say only rich children, or White children, or children with two-parent families, or children who didn't have a mental or physical handicap. He said, "Let all children come unto me."

Marian Wright Edelman:

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Michael Harrington:

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Noam Chomsky:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Origen:

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Paulo Freire:

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Pearl S. Buck:

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.

Spinoza:

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.

Stephen Jay Gould:

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Thomas Jefferson:

The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them.

Thomas Jefferson:

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

2008-04-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

Harold Nicolson:

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts.

Isaac Asimov:

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Michel de Montaigne:

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging 10 times in his life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works. (sermon, October 15, 1826)

Rita Mae Brown:

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.

Robert Coles:

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Seneca:

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

2008-04-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

Aeschylus:

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

Audre Lorde:

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Helen Keller:

We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.

Henry David Thoreau:

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain.

John D. Rockefeller:

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

John Keats:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Kahlil Gibran:

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

Kahlil Gibran:

... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Kahlil Gibran:

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Marcel Proust:

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.

Mitsugi Saotome:

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

Pearl S. Buck:
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

Unknown:

The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are -- as soon as we quit pretending we're small or unholy.

Willa Cather:

Oh, this is the joy of the rose: / That it blows, / And goes.

2008-04-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

Adrienne Rich:

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Albert Einstein:

A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labor of other [people], living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labor of my fellow [people]. I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

Amelia Earhart :

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

Felix Adler:

[People] may be said to resemble not the bricks of which a house is built, but the pieces of a picture puzzle, each differing in shape, but matching the rest, and thus bringing out the picture.

H. H. the Dalai Lama:

I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one's own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace.

Herbert Spencer:

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

Jane Addams:

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

Margaret J. Wheatley:

We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.

Margaret Wheatley:

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone [from Never Eat Alone]

Marian Wright Edelman:

[W]e are not going to deal with the violence in our communities, our homes, and our nation, until we learn to deal with the basic ethic of how we resolve our disputes and to place an emphasis on peace in the way we relate to one another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

2008-04-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

A. A. Milne:

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Abraham Lincoln:

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me.

Albert Camus:

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Albert Camus:

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Albert Einstein:

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime. . .

Albert Einstein:

Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
statement, England, September 15, 1933

Albert Schweitzer:

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Aldous Huxley:

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Anna Quindlen:

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful? "Keep her," I replied.... The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.

Anne Frank:

Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

Archibald Macleish:

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

Audrey Hepburn:

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Barbara De Angelis:

Living with integrity means:
Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships.
Asking for what you want and need from others.
Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension.
Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values.
Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe.

Bette Midler:

Cherish forever what makes you unique, ‘cuz you're really a yawn if it goes.

Betty Friedan:

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
The Feminine Mystique, 1963

Blaise Pascal:

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Buddha:

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. [paraphrased]

Buddha:

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

Carl Jung:

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.'

Carl Rogers:
If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Christopher Reeve:

I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do.

Confucius:

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Denise Levertov:

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Epictetus:

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Felix Adler:

The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.
An Ethical Philosophy of Life

Franklin Thomas:

One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
in Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983

G. H. Hardy:

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

Goethe:

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.

H. G. Wells:

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

HH the Dalai Lama:

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Harriet Goldhor Lerner:

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

Harriet Woods:

You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.

Helen Keller:

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

Henri Nouwen:

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

Henry David Thoreau:

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau:

Dreams are the touchstones of our character.

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

Izaak Walton:

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Janis Joplin:

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Joseph Campbell:

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

Keshavan Nair:

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Lorraine Hansberry:

The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely.

Lucille Ball:

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

M. Scott Peck:

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

M. Scott Peck:

Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.

Margaret Chase Smith:

Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.

Margaret Wheatley:

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone [from Never Eat Alone]

Martin Buber:

A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Mary Pettibone Poole:

To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.

Meredith Jordan:

Whatever you have forgotten, you can remember. Whatever you have buried you can unearth. If you are willing to look deep into your own nature, if you are willing to peel away the layers of not-self you have adopted in making your way through the tribulations of life, you will find that your true self is not as far removed as you think.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Nancy Friday:

Blaming mother is just a negative way of clinging to her still.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

Paul Anka:

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Paul Gruchow:
It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further -- that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite; it makes the rebuke personal; the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine.
Our Sustainable Table, 1990

Pearl S. Buck:

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Peter F. Drucker:

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.
in Arthur Goodfriend, What Is America?, 1954

Rabbi Zusya:

In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Go put your creed into the deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature, and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.
from "Spiritual Laws"

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion . . . It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Make the most of yourself for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative

Ramona L. Anderson:

People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.

Robert Coles:

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert Frost:

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Schuller:

As we grow as unique persons, we learn to respect the uniqueness of others.

Roy Croft:

I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you
Love (first stanza)

Samuel Johnson:

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

Sara Teasdale:

No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.

Simone Weil:
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

Susan B. Anthony:

Independence is happiness.

Theodore H. White:

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910

Vanessa Redgrave:

Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.

Victor Frankl:

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Victor Frankl:

Everything can be taken from a man but ... the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Virginia Satir:

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Virginia Satir:

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Virginia Woolfe:

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Voltaire:

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

William Ellery Channing:

I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

William Ellery Channing:

I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions.

William James:

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.

William Menninger:

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.

William Shakespeare:

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

Winston Churchill:

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Zelda Fitzgerald:

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.

2008-04-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus:

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement, it takes place every day.

Albert Einstein:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

Algernon Black:

The love that once was born can not die
For it has become part of us, of our life,
Woven into the very texture of our being.
Each of us would wish to leave some part of ourselves,
So here and now we bear witness to the one we knew in life,
Who now in death bequeaths a subtle part, precious and beloved,
Which will be with us in truth and beauty,
In dignity and courage and love
To the end of our days.

Amy Tan:

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

George Bernard Shaw:

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

Harriet Martineau:

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

Isaac Asimov:

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

Susan Ertz:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Woody Allen:

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

2008-04-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.

Arnold Toynbee:

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

Blaise Pascal:

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Carl Sagan:

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sandburg:

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Denise Levertov:

Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

Emily Dickinson:

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved—
The Site—of it—by Architect
Could not again be proved—

'Tis vast—as our Capacity—
As fair—as our idea—
To Him of adequate desire
No further 'tis, than Here—
George Bernard Shaw:

You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"

Gloria Steinem:

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Henry David Thoreau:

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

John Dewey:

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.
from The Quest For Certainty

John Lennon:

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.

John Lennon:

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Lauren Bacall:

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Lin Yutang:

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

2008-04-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus:

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Albert Einstein:

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Aldous Huxley:

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Anne Sexton:

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Bertrand Russell:

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Carlos Castaneda:

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Donald Williams:

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

Jean Cocteau:

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

John D. Rockefeller:

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Joni Mitchell:

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

Margaret Wheatley:

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone [from Never Eat Alone]

Rabindranath Tagore:

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Saul Alinsky:

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

2008-04-06T05:11:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Bill Moyers:

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

David Bohm:

Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes.

Dorothy Thompson:

The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

Edward R. Murrow:

Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

George Bernard Shaw:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

George Santayana:

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

John Erskine:

I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.

Linus Pauling:

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Mark Twain:

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

Sydney J. Harris:

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Victor Hugo:

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

2008-04-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Arnold Toynbee:

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted

Bill Moyers:

Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.

Carl Schurz:

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz:

Our ideals resemble the stars, which illuminate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

Don Quixote:

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Dorothy Thompson:

The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

Edwin Markham:

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Epictetus:

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Eugene V. Debs:

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech

Eugene V. Debs:

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

George Bernard Shaw:

Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"
frequently attributed to Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, who used it in a speech which his brother, Edward F. (Teddy) Kennedy quoted at RFK's funeral.

George Santayana:

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

Gloria Steinem:

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

Gustave Flaubert:

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Harold Nicolson:

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts.

Hasidic saying:

Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him, and then choose that way with all his strength.

Henry David Thoreau:

If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau:

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Henry David Thoreau:

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Isaac Asimov:

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

John Dewey:

The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value.

John F. Kennedy:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John Kenneth Galbraith:

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

John Lennon:

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you will join us, and the world will live as one.

Jonathan Kozol:

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
On Being a Teacher, 1981

Leo Buscaglia:

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

Marian Wright Edelman:

My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

Marian Wright Edelman:

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

Marian Wright Edelman:

It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

Marian Wright Edelman:

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

Marian Wright Edelman:

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Maxine Hong Kingston:

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Michelangelo:

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Norbert Capek:

It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.

Oscar Wilde:

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Princess Diana:

Only do what your heart tells you.

Rabbi Zusya:

In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

Theodore Roosevelt:

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.

Thomas Jefferson:

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Victor Frankl:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Frankl:

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

William Ellery Channing:

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

William Menninger:

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.

Zora Neale Hurston:

I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.

2008-04-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Abraham Lincoln:

Nobody has ever expected me to be president. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting.

Albert Einstein:

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Alexander Pope:

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.

Blaise Pascal:

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

Helen Keller:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Keshavan Nair:

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Rachel Carson:

It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

2008-04-06T05:04:00.000-07:00

Abraham Joshua Heschel:

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. [New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963]

Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Schweitzer:

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

Donald Williams:

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

I love humanity but I hate people.

Ernest Becker:

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

Felix Adler:

The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime.

Jane Jacobs:

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems.

Karl Marx:

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this

Margaret Laurence:

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

Mark Twain:

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Martin Luther King Jr.:

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Mme. de StaÃ«l:

The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Murray Gell-Mann:

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Pearl S. Buck:

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

Rachel Carson:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Virginia Satir:

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Wendell Berry:

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.

2008-04-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

A. Eustace Haydon:

The Humanist rarely loses the feeling of at-homeness in the universe. The Humanist is conscious of being an earth-child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of one's long ancestry still linger in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. On moonlit nights, in the renewal of life in the springtime, before the glory of a sunset, in moments of swift insight, people feel the community of their own physical being with the body of mother earth. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, the earthling has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages.

Albert Schweitzer:

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

Arthur Dobrin:

A Humanist Code of Ethics:
Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another's expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.
Allow each person the digity of his or her labor.
This entry continued ...
Charles Francis Potter:

On Humanism
Originally published in 1930
Language updated in 1994

Old: God created the world and humanity.
New: The world and humanity evolved.

Old: Hell is a place of eternal torment for the wicked.
New: Suffering is the natural result of breaking the laws of right living.

This entry continued ...
Edward Ericson:

Ethical Humanism is primarily an attitude about human beings, their worth, and the significance of their lives. It is concerned with the nature and quality of living; the character and creativity of our relationships. Because of this concern, humanism spontaneously flowers into a spiritual movement in its own right.

Emily Dickinson:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

This entry continued ...
Felix Adler:

The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime.

Gloria Steinem:

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Humanist Manifesto, 1933:

Humanism will affirm life rather than deny it, seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it, and endeavor to establish the conditions of satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.

John Dewey:

A humanistic religion, if it excludes our relation to nature, is pale and thin, as it is presumptuous, when it takes humanity as an object of worship.

John Dietrich:

Energy conveys to us the idea of motion and activity. Inside a living organism we see a source of power, which by some manner is released in terms of movement.... Life is energy... it is the creator or initiator of movement change, development. We are different from moment to moment because the life principle is at work with us.... The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.

John Lovejoy Elliott:

I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people. [language slightly modified]

Jone Johnson Lewis:

The human condition is that we are individuals in relationship, and there are tensions between individuality and relatedness. A humanist spirituality is not one of complete dependence, nor of complete independence -- neither condition can be defended as primary. Rather, a humanist spirituality is one of interdependence.

Molleen Matsumura:

In my view, humanism relies on reason and compassion. Reason guides our attempt to understand the world about us. Both reason and compassion guide our efforts to apply that knowledge ethically, to understand other people, and have ethical relationships with other people.
2/95

Pearl S. Buck:

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

Robert Ingersoll:

If abuses are destroyed, we must destroy them. If slaves are freed, we must free them. If new truths are discovered, we must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of people. The grand victories of the future must be won by humanity, and by humanity alone. (language updated)

Sir Julian Huxley:

Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
The New Divinity

Unknown:

Humanism is optimistic regarding human nature and confident in human reason and science as the best means of reaching the goal of human fulfillment in this world. Humanists affirm that humans are a product of the same evolutionary process that produced all other living organisms and that all ideas, knowledge, values, and social systems are based upon human experience. Humanists conclude that creative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy. - published in Free Mind, American Humanist Association.

Walt Whitman:

In the faces of men and women I see God.

2008-04-05T23:25:00.000-07:00

Abigail Adams:

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Albert Einstein:

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.

Albert Schweitzer:

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

Alex Carey:

... the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New

Audre Lorde :

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

Aung San Suu Kyi:

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.

Cesar Chavez:

The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.

David Kaczynski:

We've got to take back the ideal of justice, we've got to take back this principle of human dignity. We've got to take it back from vengeance, from hatred, we've got to say: look, we're all in this together. We are human beings.

Dom Helder Camara:

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

Eleanor Holmes Norton:

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

Elie Wiesel:

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.

Eugene V. Debs:

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech

HH the Dalai Lama:

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

This entry continued ...
Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Noam Chomsky:

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Noam Chomsky:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Paulo Freire:

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Pearl S. Buck:

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

Saul Alinsky:

Last guys don't finish nice.

Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago (Philippines):

I shall be honored to go to jail. Under a dictatorship, the detention cell is a place of honor.

Thomas Jefferson:

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Vaclav Havel:

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

2008-04-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

Allan K. Chalmers:

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Arundhati Roy:

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Christopher Reeve:

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

Dale Carnegie:

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Don Quixote:

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

George Bernard Shaw:

He who has never hoped can never despair.
Caesar and Cleopatra

Henry Ward Beecher:

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Lin Yutang:

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Louisa May Alcott:

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.

Margaret Fuller:

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Marion Zimmer Bradley:

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
The Trumpet of Conscience

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Molly Ivins:

I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck:

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Pearl S. Buck:

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

Samuel Johnson:

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Thomas Jefferson:

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.
1816

Thomas Merton:

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Will Durant:

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Winston Churchill:

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

2008-04-05T23:22:00.000-07:00

Emily Dickinson:

Before the ice is in the pools,
Before the skaters go,
Or any cheek at nightfall
Is tarnished by the snow,
Before the fields have finished,
Before the Christmas tree,
Wonder upon wonder
Will arrive to me!

Hamilton Wright Mabie:

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

The holiest of holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.

John Greenleaf Whittier:

Somehow, not only for Christmas
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart's possessing
Returns to you glad.

Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon:

Remember this December, that love weighs more than gold!

2008-04-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

Adrienne Rich:

False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news.

Alex Haley:

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Ambrose Bierce:

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Benjamin Disraeli:

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

David Ben Gurion:

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

David C. McCullough:

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough:

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

Denise Levertov:

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

E. L. Doctorow:

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Edward Gibbon:

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Etienne Gilson:

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

Friedrich Von Schiller:

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

George Bernard Shaw:

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

George Bernard Shaw:

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Santayana:

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

George Wilhelm Hegel:

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

Gerda Lerner:

What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.

Gerda Lerner:

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Goethe:

Patriotism ruins history.

Gustave Flaubert:

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Henry Ford:

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Henry Ford:

History is more or less bunk.

Henry Steele Commager:

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it -- as with these -- life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

Jane Austen:

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all - it is very tiresome. (spoken by Catherine Morland in 'Northanger Abbey')

Jane Haddam:

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

Jawaharial Nehru:

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Karl Marx:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx:

It is not "history" which uses men as a means of achieving -- as if it were an individual person -- its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Karl Marx:

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this

Kurt Vonnegut:

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Louise Otto:

The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that ... women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.

Mark Twain:

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Mark Twain:

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Maya Angelou:

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Norman Cousins:

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas—a place where history comes to life.

Oscar Wilde:

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Paul Valery:

History is the science of what never happens twice.

Pearl S. Buck:

One faces the future with one's past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Peter Berger:

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Peter Burke:

From time to time historians need to be shocked.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Make the most of yourself for that is all there is of you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

There is properly no history; only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Sir Walter Scott:

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Tennesse Claflin:

The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal oppression of one sex by the other. The emancipation of woman is her restoration to equal rights and privileges with man.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thomas Carlyle:

History, a distillation of rumour.

Thucydides:

History is Philosophy teaching by examples.

Vita Sackville-West:

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.

Walt Whitman:

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

Will Durant:

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Winston Churchill:

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

2008-04-05T23:18:00.000-07:00

Dante Aleghieri:

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

Emily Dickinson:

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Isaac Asimov:

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

John Calvin:

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Mark Twain:

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

Mark Twain:

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Winston Churchill:

If you're going through hell, keep going.

2008-04-05T23:16:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

Ambrose Bierce:

Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.
The Devil's Dictionary

Amos Bronson Alcott:

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.

Amy Tan:

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

Ecclesiastes:

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Emily Dickinson:

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson:

I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.

Emily Dickinson:

Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?
Did I sing—too loud?
But—I can say a little "Minor"
Timid as a Bird!

This entry continued ...
Emily Dickinson:

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.

Emily Dickinson:

What is—"Paradise"—
Who live there—
Are they "Farmers"—
Do they "hoe"—
Do they know that this is "Amherst"—
And that I—am coming—too—

This entry continued ...
Emily Dickinson:

Heaven is so far of the Mind
That were the Mind dissolved—
The Site—of it—by Architect
Could not again be proved—

'Tis vast—as our Capacity—
As fair—as our idea—
To Him of adequate desire
No further 'tis, than Here—

Emily Dickinson:

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

Goethe:

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.

H. L. Mencken:

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Isaac Asimov:

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Mark Twain:

The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.

Mark Twain:

Let us swear while we may, for in Heaven it will not be allowed.

Mark Twain:

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

Mark Twain:

The inventor of their heaven empties into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be "brothers"; they have to mix together, pray together, harp together, hosannah together--whites, niggers, Jews, everybody--there's no distinction. Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!
Letters from the Earth

Mark Twain:

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Norbert Capek:

It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.

This entry continued ...
Pearl S. Buck:

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next.

Pearl S. Buck:

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

Rabbi Zusya:

In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Robert A. Heinlein:

How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.

Robert F. Kennedy:

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

Robert Ingersoll:

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

Samuel Butler:

A lawyer's dream of Heaven: Every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Thomas Jefferson:

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

2008-04-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain:

I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.
(960 C.E.)

Albert Camus:

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Albert Camus:

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Albert Camus:

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

Albert Schweitzer:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

Albert Schweitzer:

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer:

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Algernon Black:

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.

This entry continued ...
Allan K. Chalmers:

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Amy Lowell:

Happiness: We rarely feel it.
I would buy it, beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of dripping blood
For this one transcendent good.

Anne Frank:

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

Anne Frank:

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

Aristotle:

Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient

Benjamin Disraeli:

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

Bertrand Russell:

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buddha:

Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.

Carl Jung:

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Claude Monet:

The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.

Denis Waitley:

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Ecclesiastes:

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Edith Wharton:

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.

Edward de Bono:

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.

Eric Hoffer:

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.

Felix Adler:

The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also.

Fran Leibowitz:

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

Francoise de Motteville:

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.

Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

George Burns:

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

George Sand:

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

H.H. the Dalai Lama:

The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.

HH the Dalai Lama:

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

HH the Dalai Lama:

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

HH the Dalai Lama:

Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

This entry continued ...
Helen Keller:

Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.

Helen Keller:

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

Helen Keller:

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Henry David Thoreau:

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau:

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

Horace Friess:

All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.

Hubert H. Humphrey:

Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.

James M. Barrie:

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.

James Oppenheim:

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.

John Barrymore:

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.

John D. Rockefeller:

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

John Milton:

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Kin Hubbard:

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an' wealth have both failed.

Leo Buscaglia:

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

M. Scott Peck:

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

Marcel Proust:

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Margaret Bonnano:

It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.

Mark Twain:

Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.

Mark Twain:

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

Mark Twain:

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

Mark Twain:

Happiness is a Swedish sunset -- it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it.

Mark Twain:

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

Martha Washington:

The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Norman MacEwan:

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.

Pearl S. Buck:

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Peyton Conway March:

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

To fill the hour -- that is happiness.

Ramona L. Anderson:

People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.

Robert Heinlein:

Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Sophocles:

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Susan B. Anthony:

Independence is happiness.

Theodor Fontane:

Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong, and second -- and best -- in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night's sleep and not being hurt by new shoes.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

Thomas Jefferson:

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.

Thomas Jefferson:

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

W. Beran Wolfe:

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.

Willa Cather:

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something completely great.

2008-04-05T23:10:00.000-07:00

A. E. Houseman:

A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind,
Is what you very seldom find.

If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long
The force of habit is so strong.

Annie Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Aristotle:

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Charles Kettering:

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

Mark Twain:

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

Spanish proverb:

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables.

Thomas Jefferson:

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

2008-04-05T23:09:00.000-07:00

Albert Schweitzer:

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

Albert Schweitzer:

To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.

Alfred Painter:

Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality.

Brother David Steindl-Rast :

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buddha:

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.

Cicero:

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Denis Waitley:

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Edward Gibbon:

Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.

Eric Hoffer:

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld:

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

Frederick Turner:

To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.

H. U. Westermayer:

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.

Henry Ward Beecher:

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

John F. Kennedy:

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

Leroy [Satchel] Paige:

[D]on't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.
New York Post, October 4, 1959

Marcel Proust:

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Margaret Cousins:

Appreciation can make a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.

Meister Eckhart:

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.

Melodie Beattie:

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
The Conservative

Thomas Erskine:

In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.

William James:

The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.

2008-04-05T23:06:00.000-07:00

2008-04-05T23:04:00.000-07:00

Anatole France:

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Anne Frank:

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

Carl Sandburg:

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Carl Schurz:

Our ideals resemble the stars, which illuminate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

This entry continued ...
Epictetus:

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Helen Keller:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Henry David Thoreau:

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Herb Cohen:

If you don't know where you are going, you can never get lost.

J.C. Penney:

Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk.

John Dewey:

Arriving at one point is the starting point to another.

John F. Kennedy:

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy:

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.

John Gardner:

Most important, leaders can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.

Maxine Hong Kingston:

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Michael Hanson:

To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action.

Michelangelo:

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.

Richard J. Foster:

Goals are discovered, not made.
Celebration of Discipline

Robert H. Schuller:

Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive.

Seneca:

If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Victor Frankl:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Vince Lombardi:

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Vince Lombardi:

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

W. Clement Stone:

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

Yogi Berra:

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

2008-04-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein:

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Albert Einstein:

Highly developed spirits often encounter resistance from mediocre minds.

Alexander Hamilton:

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement in a manner that would be amusingly absurd were it not so monstrously unjust and socially harmful.
Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912

Bruce Feirstein:

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Carl Sagan:

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Dorothy Thompson:

The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

Elbert Hubbard:

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Since when was genius found respectable?

Fulton J. Sheen:

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

Georg C. Lichtenberg:

Eveyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.

Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Joe Theisman:

The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
NFL football quarterback and sports analyst

Oscar Levant:

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.

Seneca:

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

William James:

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

2008-04-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.

Albert Einstein:

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.

Alex Haley:

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Anais Nin:

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

C. S. Lewis:

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Charlie Daniels:

A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Edward Gibbon:

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Elaine Maxwell:

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Eric Hoffer:

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

George Will:

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

John Dewey:

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John F. Kennedy:

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy:

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.

John L. Lewis:

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Niels Bohr:

Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

One faces the future with one's past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Simone Weil:

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Vernon Cooper:

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

W.E.B. Du Bois:

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.
It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.
It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.
Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.

2008-04-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Albert Camus:

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Alice Walker:

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Anaïs Nin:

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Ann Richards:

I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

Aristotle:

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

Audre Lorde:

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Ben Jonson:

True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.

Bertrand Russell:

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

Blaise Pascal:

Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.

C.S. Lewis:

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."

Charlie Daniels:

A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Confucius:

Silence is the true friend that never betrays.

Cornelia Otis Skinner:

To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
The Ape in Me, 1959

David Hume:

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Deng Ming-Dao:

Those truly linked don't need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, Their friendship is as true as ever.

E. B. White:

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"

E.M. Forster:

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

E.R. Bulwer-Lytton:

It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief: enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best.

Ecclesiasticus 6:14:

A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure.

Edgar Watson Howe:

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.

Elie Wiesel:

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!

Emily Dickinson:

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --

This entry continued ...
Epicurus:

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
3rd century BCE

Francis David:

We need not think alike to love alike.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

George Eliot:

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

George Eliot:

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Santayana:

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945

George Santayana:

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906

George Washington:

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Gore Vidal:

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

Henri Nouwen:

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Henry David Thoreau:

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Henry David Thoreau:

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

Henry Ward Beecher:

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

Indira Gandhi:

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

It's a Wonderful Life:

Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.

Jane Austen:

Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.

Jane Austen:

Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.

Jessamyn West:

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

Katherine Mansfield:

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

La Rochefoucauld:

A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.

Louisa May Alcott:

"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

Marcel Proust:

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Margaret Guenther:

We all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.

Mark Twain:

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Mark Twain:

The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Mark Twain:

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Marlene Dietrich:

It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends

May Sarton:

Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.

Maya Angelou:

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

Norman Douglas:

To find a friend one must close one eye; To keep him, two.

Oscar Levant:

I have no trouble with my enemies. But my goddam friends,...they are the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.

Rabindranath Tagore:

Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.

Rachel Carson:

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Naomi Remen:

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, adapted:

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.

Robert Frost:

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

Robert McAfee Brown:

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

Rollo May:

There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.

Samuel Coleridge:

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

Samuel Johnson:

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

Samuel Johnson:

Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

Sarah Orne Jewett:

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

Seneca:

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

Shel Silverstein:

Friendship
I've discovered a way to stay friends forever --

There's really nothing to it.

I simply tell you what to do

And you do it!

Shusha Guppy:

The verb "to love" in Persian is "to have a friend." "I love you" translated literally is "I have you as a friend," and "I don't like you" simply means "I don't have you as a friend."

Simone Weil:

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"

Simone Weil:

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

Sir Francis Bacon:

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

Sir Francis Bacon:

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.

Song of Solomon:

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Thomas Jefferson:

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

Toni Morrison:

I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.
speech, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1978

Unknown:

Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Unknown:

Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.

W. Somerset Maugham:

It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

Warren G. Harding:

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

William Blake:

The bird a nest
the spider a web
the human friendship.

William Blake:

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Zora Neale Hurston:

It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

2008-04-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Aldous Huxley:

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.

Barbara Ehrenreich:

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

Benjamin Franklin:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security

C. Wright Mills:

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.

Carl Shurz:

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Charlie Daniels:

A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Clarence Darrow:

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

Dorothy Thompson:

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.

Dorothy Thompson:

Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.

Dorothy Thompson:

It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

Dwight D. Eisenhower:

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.

Edward R. Murrow:

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Eleanor Holmes Norton:

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

Epictetus:

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Discourses

Erich Fromm:

Human history begins with man's act of disobedience which is at the very same time the beginning of his freedom and development of his reason.

Eugene V. Debs:

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Florynce Kennedy:

Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

Frederick Douglass:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

Goethe:

None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.

H. L. Mencken:

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken:

The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel:

Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.

Henry David Thoreau:

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Henry David Thoreau:

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

Hodding Carter:

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.

Hubert Humphrey:

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

James Baldwin:

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

Jesse Jackson:

No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.

John Adams:

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Dewey:

The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

John F. Kennedy:

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy:

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.

John F. Kennedy:

Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.

John Lewis:

We live in a country where we're supposed to have freedom of the press and religious freedom, but I think to some degree, thereâ€™s a sense of fear in America today, that if you say the wrong thing, what some people will consider what is wrong, if you step out of line, if you dissent, whether you be an entertainer, that somehow and some way this government or the forces to be will come down on you.

John P. Zenger:

No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.

John Philpot Curran:

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. (1790)

John Stuart Mill:

The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

John Stuart Mill:

The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Leonid Brezhnev:

The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.

Lillian Hellman:

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Margaret Sanger:

A free race cannot be born of slave mothers.

Marianne Williamson:

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach:

As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.

Marilyn Ferguson:

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.

Mark Twain:

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Molly Ivins:

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

Noam Chomsky:

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments."

Noam Chomsky:

If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.

Noam Chomsky:

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

Norman Thomas:

After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.

Patrick Henry:

Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Pearl S. Buck:

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Peyton Conway March:

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.

Rabbi Sherwin Wine:

There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.

The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.

This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
"Boston" Stanza 15

Ramsey Clark:

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

Robert Frost:

Freedom lies in being bold.

Rosa Luxemburg:

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

Rosa Luxemburg:

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Sam Adams:

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

Samuel Adams:

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Simone Weil:

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Somerset Maugham:

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Søren Kierkegaard:

People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.

Thomas Jefferson:

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

Thomas Jefferson:

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.

Thomas Jefferson:

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned -- this is the sum of good government.

Thomas Jefferson:

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.

Thomas Jefferson:

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Unknown:

[C]reative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy.

Victor Frankl:

Everything can be taken from a man but ... the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor Frankl:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Virginia Woolf:

To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.

Virginia Woolf:

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Voltaire:

So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

Wendell Phillips:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson

Wendy Kaminer:

Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least. [source]

William O. Douglas:

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

2008-04-05T13:49:00.002-07:00

Emily Dickinson:

All but Death, can be Adjusted—
Dynasties repaired—
Systems—settled in their Sockets—
Citadels—dissolved—

Wastes of Lives—resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs—
Death—unto itself—Exception—
Is exempt from Change—

Eric Hoffer:

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

Henry Ward Beecher:

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Hillary Rodham Clinton:

In the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said 70 times 7. Well, I want you all to know that I'm keeping a chart.

Jessamyn West:

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

John F. Kennedy:

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Lord Chesterfield:

Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.

Nathaniel Hawthorne:

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Robert Frost:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me

Sidney and Suzanne Simon:

Forgiveness is freeing up and putting to better use the energy once consumed by holding grudges, harboring resentments, and nursing unhealed wounds. It is rediscovering the strengths we always had and relocating our limitless capacity to understand and accept other people and ourselves.

Sir Francis Bacon:

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.

Voltaire:

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

William Blake:

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

2008-04-05T13:49:00.001-07:00

Albert Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Ann Radcliffe:

One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.

Carlos Castaneda:

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

David Borenstein:

Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.

George Eliot:

[I]t is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Helen Keller:

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but are felt in the heart.

Lord Byron:

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

Pearl S. Buck:

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Rachel Carson:

If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.

Virginia Woolf:

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

Winston Churchill:

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.

2008-04-05T13:45:00.002-07:00

Anais Nin:

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anne Frank:

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.

Aung San Suu Kyi:

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.

Bertrand Russell:

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Bob Dylan:

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.

Bonaro W. Overstreet:

Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves.

Chet Atkins:

Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

Don Miguel Ruiz:

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive -- the risk to be alive and express what we really are.

Dorothy Thompson:

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

Dorothy Thompson:

The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.

Dorothy Thompson:

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

Ernest Becker:

[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

Gay Hendricks:

One of the first things a relationship therapist learns is that couples argue to burn up energy that could be used for something else. In fact, arguments often serve the purpose of using up energy, so that the couple do not have to take the courageous, creative leap into an unknown they fear. Arguing serves the function of being a zone of familiarity into which you can retreat when you are afraid of making a creative breakthrough.

H. Jackson Browne:

Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.

Hannah Arendt:

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.

Henry David Thoreau:

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Henry James:

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

James F. Bymes:

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death

James Thurber:

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

Jane Addams:

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.

Louisa May Alcott:

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.

Marcus Aurelius:

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marianne Williamson:

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

This entry continued ...
Marie Curie:

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Marilyn Ferguson:

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.

May Sarton:

... without darkness
Nothing comes to birth,
As without light
Nothing flowers.

Pearl S. Buck:

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your reactions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.

Robert Louis Stevenson:

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.

Rosa Parks:

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

Shel Silverstein:

The hens they all cackle, the roosters all beg,
But I will not hatch, I will not hatch.
For I hear all the talk of pollution and war
As the people all shout and the airplane roar,
So I'm staying in here where it's safe and it's warm,
And I WILL NOT HATCH!

Swedish proverb:

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.

Thomas Hobbes:

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
Leviathan

Thomas Jefferson:

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.
1816

Thomas Jefferson:

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

Virginia Woolf:

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

William Allen White:

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

2008-04-05T13:45:00.001-07:00

Anne Sexton:

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Bertrand Russell:

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Croesus:

In peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons.

J. August Strindberg:

That is the thankless position of the father in the family -- the provider for all, and the enemy of all.

James Baldwin:

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Lydia Maria Child:

Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!

Theodore Hesburgh:

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Unknown:

To become a father is not difficult, but to be a father is.

William Shakespeare:

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

2008-04-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

Alex Haley:

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Ariel and Will Durant:

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Auguste Napier:

In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.

Ben Silliman:

American families have always shown remarkable resiliency, or flexible adjustment to natural, economic, and social challenges. Their strengths resemble the elasticity of a spider web, a gull's skillful flow with the wind, the regenerating power of perennial grasses, the cooperation of an ant colony, and the persistence of a stream carving canyon rocks. These are not the strengths of fixed monuments but living organisms. This resilience is not measured by wealth, muscle or efficiency but by creativity, unity, and hope. Cultivating these family strengths is critical to a thriving human community.
Family Life Specialist with the University of Wyoming's Cooperative Extension Service

Bertrand Russell:

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Carl Sandburg:

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

Chinese Proverb:

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish - very gently.
- sometimes attributed to Confucius

Colette:

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Confucius:

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Eda LeShan:

Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up there pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others -- and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet.

Elizabeth II:

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

Elizabeth Stone:

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.

Erma Bombeck:

You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

Evelyn Waugh:

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

Francis Bacon:

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

Francis Bacon:

Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

George Bernard Shaw:

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw:

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

George Burns:

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

George Santayana:

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Harry S Truman:

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Helen Keller:

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

Isaac Rosenfeld:

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.

Jane Howard:

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family:
Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

Jessamyn West:

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

John Donne:

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight:

Every single person has capabilities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capabilities can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given. If they are, the person will be valued, feel powerful and well-connected to the people around them. And the community around the person will be more powerful because of the contribution the person is making.

This entry continued ...
Leo Tolstoy:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - opening line from Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy:

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Margaret Mead:

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

Margaret Mead:

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

Marian Wright Edelman:

If you as parents cut corners, your children will too. If you lie, they will too. If you spend all your money on yourselves and tithe no portion of it for charities, colleges, churches, synagogues, and civic causes, your children won't either. And if parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

Marilyn French:

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Marilyn French:

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Michael Levine:

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

Pearl S. Buck:

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Sarah J. Hale:

Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome;
The good, the true, the tender -- these form the wealth of home.

Shakespeare:

The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.

Sidonie Gruenberg:

Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.

Theodore Hesburgh:

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Thomas Jefferson:

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.

Thomas Moore:

Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.

Virginia Satir:

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

William Shakespeare:

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Willie Brown:

You would think that those who are always talking about family values would want to create an environment of permanent relationships for people of the same sex. But they're not advocating family values. They're advocating their values.

2008-04-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Blaise Pascal:

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

Edward R. Murrow:

Fame is morally neutral.

Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Mark Twain:

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Marlene Dietrich:

I am not a myth.

Marlo Thomas:

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

Matthew Henry:

Goodness makes greatness truly valuable, and greatness make goodness much more serviceable.

Ogden Nash:

My garden will never make me famous,
I'm a horticultural ignoramus.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
This entry continued ...
Shirley Temple:

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.

Thomas Wolfe:

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

2008-04-05T13:23:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

Anais Nin:

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Blaise Pascal:

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

D. H. Lawrence:

This is what I believe:
That I am I.
That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.
That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.
That I must have the courage to let them come and go.
That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.
There is my creed.

Dorothy Thompson:

Disillusion comes only to the illusioned. One cannot be disillusioned of what one never put faith in.

Dorothy Thompson:

The only force that can overcome an idea and a faith is another and better idea and faith, positively and fearlessly upheld.

E. B. White:

Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

Edith Hamilton:

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

Elizabeth Barret Browning:

Whoso loves, believes the impossible.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

George Bernard Shaw:

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

George Santayana:

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
Scepticism and Animal Faith, 1923

Gladys Taber:

A garden is evidence of faith. It links us with all the misty figures of the past who also planted and were nourished by the fruits of their planting.
Stillmeadow Sampler

Harriet Martineau:

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

James Luther Adams:

The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions -- social, economic, and political -- of the common life.

Jimmy Carter:

I have one life and one chance to make it count for something . . . I'm free to choose what that something is, and the something I've chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands -- this is not optional -- my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.

Joanna Russ:

Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet: it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of time and right into Eternity, which is not theend of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, the old Eternal Now.

John A. Hutchinson:

Unthinking faith is a curious offering to be made to the creator of the human mind.

Louisa May Alcott:

Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.
in Little Women, chapter 36

Marian Wright Edelman:

My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

Marian Wright Edelman:

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Mary McLeod Bethune:

Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

Oliver Wendell Holmes:

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Paul Tillich:

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of (our) total being. They all are united in the act of faith.

Pearl S. Buck:

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.

Pearl S. Buck:

When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.

Peter F. Drucker:

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Thomas Jefferson:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
letter to Connecticut Baptists

W. H. Auden:

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.

2008-04-05T13:21:00.002-07:00

Anais Nin:

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Ashley Montagu:

The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.

Corita Kent:

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Edward de Bono:

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

Elaine Maxwell:

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.

Elbert Hubbard:

A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.

Elizabeth Drew:

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

George Bernard Shaw:

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw:

My reputation grows with every failure.

Havelock Ellis:

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.

Herbert B. Swope:

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.

It's a Wonderful Life:

Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis:

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

James Russell Lowell:

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

Jessamyn West:

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

John Dewey:

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Kin Hubbard:

You won't skid if you stay in a rut.

Laurence J. Peter:

There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

Lloyd Jones:

Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed. (adapted)

Madame de Stael:

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

May Sarton:

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Oscar Wilde:

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Paulo Coelho:

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Pearl S. Buck:

Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.

Peter Drucker:

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Rabindranath Tagore:

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Ralph Ellison:

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Robert F. Kennedy:

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Robert Frost:

The best way out is always through.

Samuel Goldwyn:

You've got to take the bitter with the sour.

Samuel Smiles:

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

Samuel Smiles :

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910

Thomas Alva Edison:

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Alva Edison:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Fuller:

No garden is without its weeds.

Wallace Stegner:

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

William M. Winans:

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.

William Saroyan:

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Winston Churchill:

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill:

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

2008-04-05T13:21:00.001-07:00

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Carolyn Heilbrun:

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidentially expect utopia. Both are wrong.

George Santayana:

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

John W. Gardner:

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.

2008-04-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Barbara Tuchman:

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.

Benjamin Franklin:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Bureau of Social Hygiene study, 1928:

It is very difficult and expensive to undo after you are married the things that your mother and father did to you while you were putting your first six birthdays behind you.

Douglas Adams:

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Edith Wharton:

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edward Abbey:

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Edward Gibbon:

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Ethel Barrymore:

You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Felix Adler:

Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.

Francis Bacon:

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

Iris Murdock:

We can only learn to love by loving.

John Dewey:

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Oscar Wilde:

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Pearl S. Buck:

One faces the future with one's past.

Pete Seeger:

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

Rita Mae Brown:

Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Samuel Smiles :

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Vernon Cooper:

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

2008-04-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.

Alexander Pope:

'Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed' was the ninth beatitude.

Alice Walker:

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Anna Quindlen:

It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now.

Brian Tracy:

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Candace Bergen:

People see you as an object, not as a person, and they project a set of expectations onto you. People who don't have it think beauty is a blessing, but actually it sets you apart.

Cervantes:

Those who will play with cats must expect to be scratched.

Charlotte Bronte:

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Dame Edith Evans:

I can't imagine going on when there are no more expectations.

Dennis Wholey:

Expecting the world to treat you fairly
because you are a good person
is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you
because you are a vegetarian.

Edward de Bono:

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

Ellen Galinsky:

Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents-to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.

Goethe:

Treat a man as he is, he will remain so. Treat a man the way he can be and ought to be, and he will become as he can be and should be."

Henry David Thoreau:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Henry David Thoreau:

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

Henry David Thoreau:

Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures.

Henry Ford:

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right. also attributed to Mary Kay Ash

Joan Didion:

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

John Lubbock:

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

Leo Buscaglia:

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

Mark Twain:

Always do right--this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
message to Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York, February 16, 1901

Mark Twain:

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

Mark Twain:

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Mary Decker Stanley:

I've always got such high expectations for myself. I'm aware of them, but I can't relax them.
athlete

Mary Kay Ash:

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.

Michael Jordan:

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

Patricia Neal:

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though awakens your own expectations.

Patricia Neal:

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.

Samuel Johnson:

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.

Thomas Alva Edison:

If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.

Thomas Jefferson:

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Victor Frankl:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Walt Whitman:

Reexamine all that you have been told in school, or in church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Yogi Berra:

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

2008-04-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

Pearl S. Buck:
The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Is it so bad to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.

2008-04-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.

Benjamin Franklin:

Setting too good an example is a kind of slander seldom forgiven.

Christian Nevell Bovee:

Example has more followers than reason.

Francis Bacon, sr.:

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld:

The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they themselves are no longer able to set a bad example.

George Bernard Shaw:

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Samuel Smiles:

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

Thomas Fuller:

A good example is the best sermon.

2008-04-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein:

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Albert Einstein:

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Aldous Huxley:

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Barry Lopez:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams

Benjamin Haydon:

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Blaise Pascal:

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Blaise Pascal:

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Blaise Pascal:

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

Cicero:

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Edmund Burke:

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke (attributed):

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Epicurus:

Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.

Ernest Becker:

In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.

H. L. Mencken:

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

Hannah Arendt:

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt:

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Helen Keller:

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

Henry Brooks Adam:

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Henry David Thoreau:

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Hierocles:

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

James Baldwin:

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Joseph Conrad:

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad:

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Leonardo da Vinci:

He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.

Mae West:

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove blemishes from others without thinking evil of them.

Molly Ivins:

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

Paramahansa Yogananda:

Life has a bright side and a dark side, for the world of relativity is composed of light and shadows. If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil, you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.

Pascal:

Man is neither angel nor brute, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.

Paul Ricoeur:

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

Pearl S. Buck:

When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

Raisa Gorbachev:

Hypocrisy, the lie, is the true sister of evil, intolerance, and cruelty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Robert Heinlein:

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.

Soren Kierkegaard:

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

Unknown:

In this world everything changes except good deeds and bad deeds; these follow you as the shadow follows the body.

William Penn:

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

2008-04-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

Abraham Lincoln:

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion.

Albert Einstein:

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Albert Einstein:

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

Albert Einstein:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

Albert Einstein:

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Albert Schweitzer:

Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us], but allow [us] really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.

Albert Schweitzer:

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

Albert Schweitzer:

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949

Albert Schweitzer:

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

Albert Schweitzer:

Let me give you the definition of ethics: it is good to maintain life and to further life. It is bad to damage and destroy life. And this ethic, profound and universal, has the significance of a religion. It is religion.

Albert Schweitzer:

Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind, independent of the prevalent one among the crowds, and in opposition to it -- a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

Albert Schweitzer:

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Albert Schweitzer:

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Albert Schweitzer:

What does Reverence for Life say abut the relations between [humanity] and the animal world? Whenever I injury any kind of life I must be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable, not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed down a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes on the law of life without being under the pressure of necessity.

Algernon Black:

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.

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Arthur Dobrin:

A Humanist Code of Ethics:
Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another's expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.
Allow each person the digity of his or her labor.
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Barbara Ehrenreich:

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."

Barbara Ehrenreich:

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Barbara Jordan:

All my growth and development led me to believe that if you really do the right thing, and if you play by the rules, and if you've got good enough, solid judgment and common sense, that you're going to be able to do whatever you want to do with your life.

Barry Lopez:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams

Buddha:

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.

Bureau of Social Hygiene study, 1928:

It is very difficult and expensive to undo after you are married the things that your mother and father did to you while you were putting your first six birthdays behind you.

Charlotte Bronte:

Conventionality is not morality.

Christopher Bigsby and Malcolm Bradbury:

You know what they say: if God had been a Liberal, we wouldn't have had the ten commandments. We'd have had the ten suggestions.

Cicero:

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Denis Diderot:

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

Dorothy Rowe:

We would like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves that we are good in order to survive.

Edward Ericson:

The cosmos is neither moral or immoral; only people are. He who would move the world must first move himself.

Edwin Markham:

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Eric Hoffer:

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

Felix Adler:

Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.

Felix Adler:

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.

Felix Adler:

The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.
An Ethical Philosophy of Life

Freda Adler:

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

George Bernard Shaw:

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
1903, Man and Superman

H. L. Mencken:

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

HH the Dalai Lama:

Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

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Heinz Pagels:

Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.
The Dreams of Reason, 1988

Henry David Thoreau:

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Letter, March 27, 1848

Hierocles:

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

Isaac Asimov:

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Isaac Asimov:

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Isocrates:

The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.

Jane Addams:

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

Jane Addams:

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

John Burroughs:

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

John Wesley:

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

Marcus Aurelius:

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach:

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Mark Twain:

Always do right--this will gratify some and astonish the rest.
message to Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, New York, February 16, 1901

Mark Twain:

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Matthew Arnold:

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Matthew Henry:

Goodness makes greatness truly valuable, and greatness make goodness much more serviceable.

Molleen Matsumura:

Reason guides our attempt to understand the world about us. Both reason and compassion guide our efforts to apply that knowledge ethically, to understand other people, and have ethical relationships with other people.
2/95

Noam Chomsky:

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Omar N. Bradley:

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Origen:

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

Paul Ricoeur:

The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.

Pearl S. Buck:

It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.

Pearl S. Buck:

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Plato:

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Rabindranath Tagore:

He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

Robert Wright:

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice -- all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the "good of the species" and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. [from The Moral Animal]

Shirley Chisholm:

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

T. S. Eliot:

The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Murder in the Cathedral

Theodore Bikel:

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

Theodore Parker:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

Thomas Erskine:

In the New Testament, religion is grace and ethics is gratitude.

Thomas Paine:

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Unknown:

In this world everything changes except good deeds and bad deeds; these follow you as the shadow follows the body.

Vaclav Havel:

Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

Victor Frankl:

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

W. H. Auden:

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

William Channing Gannett:

Ethics thought out is religious thought; ethics felt out is religious feeling, and ethics lived out is the religious life.

William J. H. Boetcker:

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.

William James:

[T]he true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.

William Lloyd Garrison:

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

William Penn:

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

William Robertson Smith :

But we must not forget... this ritual expressed... certain ideas which lie at the very root of true religion, the fellowship of the worshippers with one another in their fellowship with the deity, and the consecration of the bonds of kinship as the type of all right ethical relations between man and man.