I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
Leo Rosten (1908 – )
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca (5 BC – 65 AD)
Always behave like a duck – keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.
Jacob Braude
It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990)
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)
One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.
G.K. Chesterton
Forgive many things in others; nothing in yourself.
Ausonius
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915)
It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962), ‘This Is My Story,’ 1937
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940), “The Crack-Up” (1936)
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Successful people in this world are those who get up and look for circumstances they want. If they can’t find them, they make them.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
Dr. Thomas Arnold Bennett
Virtue is its own punishment.
Aneurin Bevan
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Paul Valery (1871 – 1945)
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
Gail Godwin
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey (1927 – 1989)
Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another’s way of life – so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!
Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, then you had better get what you can appreciate.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), Pygmalion
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order — and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
Douglas Hostadter
It is not the greatness of a man’s means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
William Cobbett (1763 – 1835)
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – )
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.