January 2007

Georges Clemenceau Quotations

-A man’s life is interesting primarily when he had failed – for it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself. -War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory. Georges Clemenceau

Robert Oppenheimer Quotations

To what appear to be the simplest questions, we will tend to give either no answer or an answer which will at first sight be reminiscent more of a strange catechism than of the straight forward affirmatives of physical science. If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we [...]

Kent M. Keith

The Paradoxical Commandments 1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. 2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. 3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. 4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good [...]

Francis Bacon Quotations

-Nothing is terrible except fear itself. -A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. -Some men covet knowledge out of a natural curiosity and inquisitive temper; some to entertain the mind with variety and delight; some for ornament and reputation; some for victory and contention; many for lucre and livelihood; and but few [...]

Stephen Covey Quotations

-Never in my 25 years of leadership training has there been a time when principles and pragmatism have converged as completely as they do today. -My goal in life is to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am. -One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to [...]

Rabindranath Tagore Quotations

-What is art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real. -I slept and dreamed that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy. -Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is [...]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Quotations

-Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy…if anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once. -For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for. -A new philosophy, a new way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for [...]

Italian Proverbs

-Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box. -If you scatter thorns, don’t go barefoot. -It is not enough to aim; you must hit. -The best armor is to keep out of range. -To a quick question, give a slow answer. -Between saying and doing many a [...]

G. K. Chesterton Quotations

-The greatest problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it’s hardly been tried at all. -The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. -To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right [...]

Frank Lloyd Wright Quotations

-The truth is more important than the facts. -Youth is a quality, and if you have it, you never lose it. -The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen. -Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. Frank [...]

G.W.F. Hegel

Thus to be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. G.W.F. Hegel

Reginald Blyth

Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks. Reginald Blyth

George Burns Quotations

-Fall in love with what you do for a living. I don’t care what it is. It works. -I’d rather fail at doing something I love than succeed at doing something I hate. -Age to me means nothing. I can’t get old; I’m working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work. [...]

François Mitterand

We learn only when it is too late that the marvel is the passing moment. François Mitterand

Pablo Picasso Quotations

-It takes one a long time to become young. -When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. -When it comes right down to it, all you have is your self. Your Self is a sun with a thousand rays… -It is your Work in life that is the ultimate seduction. [...]

Dan Fogelberg Quotations

-Travel the path of the heart instead of the path of convenience. -The higher you climb, The more that you see. The more that you see, The less that you know. The less that you know, The more that you yearn. The more that you yearn, The higher you climb. The farther you reach, The [...]

Japanese Proverbs

-The Gods only laugh when we pray to them for money. -He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger. -He is poor who does not feel content. -Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. -Don’t stay long when the husband is not at home. Japanese Proverbs

Leo Tolstoy Quotations

-The Kingdom of God is Within You -Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. -Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them. -If one has no vanity in this life of [...]

Daisaku Ikeda Quotations

-Adversity gives birth to greatness. The greater the challenges and difficulties we face, the greater opportunity we have to grow and develop as people. A life without adversity, a life of ease and comfort, produces nothing and leaves us with nothing. This is one of the indisputable facts of life. -You must not for one [...]

Peter Block Quotations

-Bosses are no longer customers, they are suppliers. -No one should be able to make a living simply planning, watching, controlling, or evaluating the actions of others. -A supervisor in the regulatory unit of a drug company named these principals for her unit: No more privileges. No umbrella protection from me. We each take ownership [...]

Friedrich Nietzsche Quotations

-Do you call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling idea, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. -Is not life a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves? -One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. -One should not wish [...]

Sallust Quotations

-Before you act consider; when you have considered, tis fully time to act. -Every man is the architect of his own fortune. -Few men desire liberty; The majority are satisfied with a just master. -Small communities grow great through harmony, great ones fall to pieces through discord. -The higher your station, the less your liberty. [...]

General Douglas MacArthur Quotations

-I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. -There is no security on this earth; there is only [...]

e.e.cummings Quotations

-…to be nobody-but yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. -Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. e.e.cummings

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotations

-The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. -Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us; but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove [...]

Mevlana Rumi Quotations

-Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart. -Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls. -Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real Sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl. -Everything [...]

Sigmund Freud Quotations

-Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. -A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. -A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. -America [...]

John Donne

-No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; [...]

Jessica Henderson

you see a city? i call it a graveyard. that skyline’s mere headstones our habits are caskets holding us six feet underground. Jessica Henderson

Paul Hawken Quotations

-Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them. -How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist? -As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth. -Always [...]

John Stuart Mill Quotations

-Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. -Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. -One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine with only interests. -If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one [...]

Robert Heilbroner

Lack of time is the new poverty. Robert Heilbroner

Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotations

-As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out. -It is more important to find out what you are giving to society than to ask what is the right means of livelihood. -It is our earth, not yours or mine or his. We are [...]

Eleanor Roosevelt Quotations

-The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. -No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. -You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience by which you stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself “I lived through this horror. I [...]

Ha Gakure (Hidden Leaves)

-…when your thinking rises above concern for your own welfare, wisdom which is independent of thought appears. -Get beyond love and grief; exist for the good of man. -if you are slain in battle, you should be resolved to have your corpse facing the enemy Ha Gakure (Hidden Leaves)

E. F. Schumacher Quotations

-An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. -The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. -There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. -That [...]

Emily Dickinson Quotations

-Some keep the Sabbath going to Church The Soul Selects her own Society -I’m nobody, Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? … -Of ‘shunning Men and Women’ – they talk of Hallowed things, aloud – and embarrass my Dog – He and I don’t object to them, if they’ll exist their side. [...]

Dave Barry Quotations

-You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, “My God, you’re right! I never would’ve thought of that!” -You can only be young once. But you can always be immature. -What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death. -I can win [...]

Neil Postman Quotations

There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well-suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it [...]

Jean-Charles Crombez Quotations

-We are often more astonished about what is outside us than inside us. For example, we think that the powers of healing are outside us, but in fact we may reach them inside us. They are already there and the problem is not to reach them, the question is to let them happen in ourselves. [...]

George Matthew Adams Quotations

There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success. George Matthew Adams

Frank A. Clark Quotations

-A baby is born with a need to be loved and never outgrows it. -We find comfort among those who agree with us-growth among those who don’t. -There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair. -The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them. [...]

Robertson Davies Quotations

-The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of [...]

Grace Murray Hopper

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it. ATTRIBUTION: On the removal of a 2-inch-long moth from an experimental computer at Harvard in 1945, quoted in Time 16 Apr 84 Grace Murray Hopper

Joseph A. Schumpeter Quotations

-Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil. -Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. -Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it. Joseph A. Schumpeter

Robert Fulghum Quotations

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there, in the sand pile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Don’t [...]

Herman Melville Quotations

-Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the [...]

Jesus Christ Quotations

-Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, For they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God. Blessed [...]

Pablo Neruda Quotations

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. Pablo Neruda

Robert M. Pirsig Quotations

-Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. -To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the [...]

Ed Viesturs

You don’t assault Everest. You sneak up on it, and then get the hell outta there. Ed Viesturs

John Muir Quotations

-As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can. -One fancies a heart like our own must [...]

Li Po

The birds have vanished in the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and I until only the mountain remains. Li Po

Erwin Schrodinger Quotations

-Pure consciousness is singular; plurality is caused by illusion. -For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. Erwin Schrodinger

Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotations

-You are here to enjoy an original relationship with the universe. -This world is so beautiful that I can hardly believe it exists. -Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. -If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. [...]

Evan Esar Quotations

-The zoo is an excellent place to study the habits of human beings. -You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. -Character is what you have left when you’ve lost everything you can lose. -Many a man who falls in love with a [...]

Robert Louis Stevenson Quotations

-To be what you are, and to become what you are capable of becoming, is the only purpose in life. -Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. -To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success [...]

John Keats Quotations

-We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. -Do you not see [...]

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotations

-There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. -He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence -For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early [...]

Plato Quotations

-Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. -A society cultivates what is honoured there. It is important to know what we honour. -Life must be lived as play. -There are three classes of men: lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, and lovers of gain. -Know thyself. -No human thing is [...]

Paul Valery Quotations

-A poem is never finished, only abandoned. -Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas [...]

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotations

-If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. -Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake somebody up. -To say the least, [...]

Tony Blair Quotations

-the City whiz-kids, with salaries only fractionally less than their greed, now seem not only morally dubious, but incompetent. (On the share collapse in October 1987) -Take a project like Band Aid for instance. Many people worked very hard for Band Aid, and OK, it raised millions of pounds, but then more money was being [...]

Tom Schulman Quotations

Now I’d like you to step forward over here. They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like [...]

Tom Robbins Quotations

-You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one’s life. So you lose it, you go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey ’til the [...]

Tom Peters Quotations

-Underpromise; overdeliver. -Celebrate what you want to see more of. -If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven’t figured it out yet. -If your company has a clean-desk policy, the company is nuts and you’re nuts to stay there. -Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast. -The magic formula that [...]

Tim Berners-Lee Quotations

-We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges. -Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design. -If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. [...]

Thomas Moore Quotations

-”Repression of the life force” is a diagnosis I believe would fit most of the emotional problems people present in therapy. -By learning to discover and value our ordinariness, we nurture a friendliness toward ourselves and the world that is the essence of a healthy soul. Thomas Moore

Thomas Mann Quotations

-Time cools. Time clarifies. No mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. -Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates. -There is at bottom only one problem in the world and this is its name. How does one break through? [...]

Thomas Lovell Beddoes Quotations

-If there were dreams to sell, What would you buy? Some cost a passing bell; Some a light sigh, That shakes from Life’s fresh crown Only a rose-leaf down. If there were dreams to sell, Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rang the bell, What would you buy? A cottage lone and still, [...]

Thomas Jefferson Quotations

-But if something is not done, and done soon, we shall be the murderers of our own children. -The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. -I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, [...]

Thomas Gray Quotations

-The paths of glory lead but to the grave. -Sweet is the breath of vernal shower, The bee’s collected treasures sweet, Sweet music’s melting full, but sweeter yet The still small voice of gratitude. Thomas Gray

Thomas Edison Quotations

-Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. -Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress. -I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. -To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -If we all did the things we [...]

Theodore Roethke Quotations

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. Theodore Roethke

Terry Fox Quotations

-I remember promising myself that should I live I would prove myself deserving of life. -I’m not doing this run to become rich or famous. One of the problems with our world is that people are getting greedy and selfish. -It is courage and not foolishness. -I told myself it is too late to give [...]

Terence

-There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly -Their silence is sufficient praise. Terence

Tennessee Williams Quotations

-Hell is yourself, and the only redemption is when you put yourself aside to feel deeply for another person. -Success and failure are equally disastrous. -A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. -Make voyages! – Attempt them! – there’s nothing else… Tennessee Williams

The Upanishads

-You are what your deepest desire is. As you desire, so is your intention. As your intention, so is your will. As is your will so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny. -The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only [...]

T.S. Eliot Quotations

-Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. -In a world of fugitives the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away. -I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. -We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring [...]

Sun Tzu Quotations

-Therefore the considerations of the intelligent always include both benefit and harm. As they consider benefit, their work can expand; as they consider harm, their troubles can be resolved. -All warfare is based on deception. Sun Tzu

François Marie Arouet Voltaire Quotations

-The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease. -Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is. -La Nature a été en eux forte que l’éducation. (Nature is more powerful than education.) (See Disraeli) -Everything must end; meanwhile we must amuse ourselves. -Doubt is not [...]

Virgil Quotations

-Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to Love. -I have known sorrow and learned to aid the wretched. Virgil

Vincent van Gogh Quotations

-Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, “What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me [...]

Vince Lombardi Quotations

-Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. -If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. Vince Lombardi

Victor Hugo Quotations

-Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. -There is only one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, that is an idea whose time has come. -There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. -The quantity of civilization is measured [...]

Victor Frankl Quotations

-We who lived in the 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 – [...]

George Bernard Shaw Quotations

-This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that [...]

Thorstein Veblen Quotations

-The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. -Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the [...]

Vauvenargues

People find happiness in both wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Contentment is no index of true worth. Vauvenargues (1715-47)

Margaret Mead Quotations

-Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. -We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems. -No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that [...]

Marie Howe Quotations

I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age? They stand in unison [...]

Mark

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36

Mark Sullivan

The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type of all times, was not the hustler but the whittler. Mark Sullivan

Mary Oliver Quotations

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice– though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, [...]

Marsilio Ficino

…artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love Marsilio Ficino

Martin Buber Quotations

-God is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I. -The history of mankind on its road to redemption (is) a process involving two kinds of men, the proud who, if sometimes in the sublimest form, think of themselves, and the [...]

Martin Luther Quotations

Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? Vanity asks the question, Is it popular? But conscience asks the question, Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his [...]

Mary Pickford

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down. Mary Pickford

Mataemon Iso

Approach the moment with the idea that you’re in the fight to the finish. Mataemon Iso

Otto von Bismarck Quotations

-Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made. -When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice. Otto von Bismarck

Bliss Carman

-I often wish… that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease. -Indifference may not wreck a man’s life at any one turn, but it will destroy him with a kind of dry-rot in [...]

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