Lorelle has been collecting quotes since she first began to read, and has quite a collection. We have incorporated the most appropriate quotes from her collection and research into our pages where appropriate and enjoyable. We’ve had a lot of requests to share these, so we’ve gathered them together in a series of pages for you to peruse. The quotes from within our pages cover nature and photography, travel, and life in general. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
…there is such a thing as perfection…and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth….Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.
from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach
All earthly pain is due to our inability to release what needs to be free. When you release what needs to be free, YOU are freed in the process.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Behind all your anger and fear, beneath all your sadness and loss is the need for love. How much love are you willing to accept from others? How much are you willing to give?
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Can miles truly separate us from friends? If we want to be with someone we love, aren’t we already there?
Richard Bach, There’s No Such Place as Far Away
Did you know that you could experience love, pain, joy, anger, death and rebirth all at the same time and still be perfectly sane?
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Disease is the soul screaming through the body, attempting to get the Truth out once and for all.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Do you love yourself enough to ask for what you need?
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
How would it be to know that when life doesn’t seem to be working, it is STILL working perfectly?
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
Hans Reichenbach
If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
If you know you are not your sports car, your grades, or your children’s grades, your color, your degrees or your spouses’s degrees, you age, your titles or your family’s titles, your body, your possessions or your parents’ possessions – Congratulations. You are Home again.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
Richard Bach, Illusions
It’s better to lead with your dreams, than to be pushed by your problems.
John T. Dornbach
Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world – even if what is published is not true.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Berthold Auerbach
Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.
Richard Bach
Our immune system is only as strong as the dosage of self-love, self-acceptance, and self-care that we administer to ourselves daily.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Question: Since you are here to remember who you are, why have you forgotten? Answer: Perhaps you have lived another’s dream and not your own.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Sometimes it takes great effort to discover that life was meant to be effortless.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
That’s what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
The dignity the world awards you is in exact proportion to the dignity you award yourself.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
The only infallible, immutable, unlimited power that heals without question is Love.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
There is a peaceful place inside that welcomes you. A space so safe, so still, that there is no forward or backward – only the eternal flow of NOW. Enter this radiance where the truth of your being resides, and remember who you are.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
There is such a thing as perfection. . . and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. . . .
Richard Bach, from Illusions
There is no one to compare yourself to, and no one to compete with. There never was. When the Rose and Lotus are side by side, is one more beautiful than the other?
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
From Illusions by Richard Bach
What we wouldn’t give to know that it is okay not to feel okay and to know that it is okay to feel powerful, magnificent, deserving – even extraordinary.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
When you know you are doing your very best within the circumstances of your existence, applaud yourself. Above all forgive yourself. …and, forgive everyone else.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
When you awaken to who and what you are, everyone automatically awakens to who and what you are, without a word spoken.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Wherever you are in this moment, is exactly where you are supposed to be, no matter how things may seem to appear.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true
Richard Bach, from Illusions
You stand outside the circle and wonder why you feel left out, unaware that you need your OWN permission to join the others – not theirs. And sometimes there are those who love themselves enough to pull you into the circle.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.
Richard Bach, from Illusions
Your loneliness is your Self wanting to make friends with itself. Your loneliness is your Heart wanting to sing to itself. Your loneliness is your Being wanting to dance with itself.
Rusty Berkus, Appearances
…the ability to piece together work that will both satisfy and support us is the secret to surviving, even thriving.
Wendy Reid Crisp
“Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.
Gerald W. Johnston
‘Come to the edge,’ he said. They said, ‘We are afraid.’ ‘Come to the edge,’ he said. They came. He pushed them… And they flew.
Peter McWilliams
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.
Abraham Maslow
A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, nothing else.
Andre Malraux
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
Anne Morrow Lindberg
A lot of words get spilled as the urge to be understood clashes with an aversion to being understood too well.
anonymous
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.
Charles Brower
A wise man lowers a ladder before he jumps into a pit.
folk saying
A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.
George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
A year from now you may wish you had started today.
Karen Lamb
A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
Mahatma Gandhi
A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.
Mildred Witte Stouven
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools.
Spanish proverb
A friend is someone who sees through you and still enjoys the view.
Wilma Askinas
About the time we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
Herbert Hoover
Action is eloquence.
William Shakespeare
All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber
All prosperity begins in the mind and is dependent only on the full use of our creative imagination.
Ruth Ross
An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
W. Somerset Maugham
As we come around and take our places at the table, a moment to remember and reflect upon our wealth. Here’s to loving friends and family, here’s to being able to gather here together in good company and health. And may the light of Love be shining deep within your spirit, May the torch of Mercy clear the path and show the way, May the horn of Plenty sound so everyone can hear it, May the light of Love be with you every day.
from May the Light of Love by David Roth
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Henry David Thoreau
As for disappointing them, I should not so much mind; but I can’t abide to disappoint myself.
Oliver Goldsmith
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Attitudes are contagious. Are yours worth catching?
anonymous
Average isn’t awful, but it is as close to the bottom as it is to the top.
unknown
Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience.
Hasidic saying
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
James Bryant Conant
But he had let himself be bulldozed by the odds against him. He promised himself never again to pay any attention to the odds, but only the issues.
Robert A. Heinlein : Between Planets
Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.
Adlai Stevenson
Change cannot be avoided….Change provides the opportunity for innovation. It gives you the chance to demonstrate your creativity.
Kesgavan Nair
Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
Andre Gide
Contentment: The smother of invention.
Ethel Mumford
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Ambrose Redmoon
Courage is the price that Love exacts for granting peace.
Amelia Earhart
Courage: doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
Eddie Rickenbacker
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill
Creativity: Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil.
Bernard Baruch
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
Diamonds are only chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs, you see.
Minnie Richard Smith
Do not let yourselves be discouraged or embittered by the smallness of the success you are likely to achieve in trying to make life better. You certainly would not be able, in a single generation, to create an earthly paradise. Who could expect that? But, if you make life ever so little better, you will have done splendidly, and your lives will have been worthwhile.
Arnold Toynbee
Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself; but do not relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you.
Stewart E. White
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
Vincent van Gogh
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
Albert Camus
Don’t count the days, make the days count.
anonymous
Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.
Betty Ford (also attr. to Janis Joplin)
Don’t go through life, grow through life.
Eric Butterworth
Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.
Louis E. Boone
Don’t throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.
Swedish proverb
Dreams never hurt anybody if you keep working right behind the dreams to make as much of them become real as you can.
Frank W. Woolworth
Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
Paul Goodman
Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.
anonymous
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
Frederic Chopin
Every one of us live this life just once; if we are honest, to live once is enough.
Greta Garbo
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1775
Everybody knows that if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Gertrude Stein
Everyday happiness means getting up in the morning, and you can’t wait to finish your breakfast. You can’t wait to do your exercises. You can’t wait to put on your clothes. You can’t wait to get out–and you can’t wait to come home, because the soup is hot.
George Burns
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
Everyone thinks his sack heaviest.
George Herbert
Everything, absolutely everything we see about us is the end result of decisions made, or not made, in all our yesterdays.
Perry Norton
Fear nothing, for every renewed effort raises all former failures into lessons, all sins into experiences.
Katherine Tingley
Finish what you begin. Public confidence in government isn’t guaranteed; it has to be earned. I know of no other way to earn the trust and cooperation of the public than first, to say what you intend to do, and second, to do it.
Neil Goldschmidt
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin–real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Fr. Alfred D’souza
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
George Bernard Shaw
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
Elise Boulding
Good questions outrank easy answers.
Paul A. Samuelson
Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
C. D. Jackson
Great tranquility of heart is his who cares for neither praise nor blame.
Thomas a’ Kempis
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Iris Murdoch
Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have footing.
Albert P. Ryder
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon, Essays
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
Harold Wilson
He is not worthy of the honeycomb that shuns the hive because the bees have stings.
Shakespeare
He that scattereth thorns must not go barefoot.
Thomas Fuller
He knew that insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven
Heaven has a road, but no one travels it; Hell has no gate but men will dig to get there.
Chinese Proverb
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world….Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for…success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.
Vaclav Havel
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius
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.
Douglas Adams
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
I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
Charlotte Bronte
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
Gilda Radner, 1946-1989
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
Henry Ford
I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape this aloneness.
Jim Harrison, Dalva
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I will not take’but’ for an answer.
Langston Hughes
I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that not two, or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were both able to live and to die. All these men were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.
Leo Tolstoy
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.
Lillian Hellman
I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.
Sir Humphry Davy
I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked if I had any questions. I said yes, just one, if you’re in a car traveling at the speed of light and you turn your headlights on, does anything happen? He said he couldn’t answer that. I told him sorry, but I couldn’t work for him then.
Steven Wright
I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
Ursula K. LeGuin
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the one who sold it.
Will Rogers
I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.
WM. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III/Scene ii
I’d rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I haven’t.
Lucille Ball
I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.
Clint Eastwood
If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
Anita Koddick
If you haven’t any charity in your heart, then you have the worst kind of heart trouble.
Bob Hope
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. White
If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.
Gail Sheehy
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man’s life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
Miguel de Unamuno
If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.
Peter Bender
If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr
If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.
Robert South
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Henry Huxley
In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin; A grass-blade’s no easier to make than an oak.
James Russell Lowell
In seeking wisdom thou are wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it thou are a fool.
Rabbi Ben-Azai
In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
Richard Bach, Illusions
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments–there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll
In fine, nothing is said now that has not been said before.
Terence. 185-159
In the coming world they will not ask me,’Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me,’Why were you not Zusya?’
Zusya
It is necessary for us to learn from others’ mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.
Adm. Hyman G. Rickover
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler
It is not doing the things we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do that makes life blessed.
Goethe
It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
Jim Bishop
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
Kenich Ohmae, “The Borderless World”
It is curious–curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca
Joy is not in things; it is in us.
Richard Wagner
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.
Lao-Tzu
Like farmers, we need to learn that we cannot sow and reap in the same day.
unknown
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
Will Rogers
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupory
Love not what you are, but what you may become.
Cervantes
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.
Daniel Burnham
Maybe you’re right, boss. It all depends on the way you look at it….Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree.’What, granddad!’ I exclaimed.’Planting an almond tree?’ and he, bent as he was, turned round and said, ‘my son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied,’And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying they made them.
anonymous
Most people seek after what they do not possess and are enslaved by the very things they want to acquire.
Anwar El-Sadat
Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.
Freya Stark, French-English travel writer “The Journey’s Echo.
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
Jim Ryun
My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
Charles F. Kettering
My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income.
Errol Flynn
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
Henry Ford
Never do anything when you are in a temper, for you will do everything wrong.
Baltasar Gracian
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
George S. Patton
Never cut what you can untie.
Joseph Joubert
Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never, never–in nothing great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.
Winston Churchill
No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
Ian E. Wilson
No one wants advice–only corroboration.
John Steinbeck
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Samuel Ullman
None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for a lifetime.
Gail Godwin
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Martin Luther King, December 11, 1964
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
Nothing would be done at all if one waited until one could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
Cardinal Newman
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
Mark Twain
Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength.
Ralph Sockman
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
Margaret Young
Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk–and to act.
Maxwell Maltz
Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of Reason, I’m very much afraid you will never really see the point.
Hafiz of Shiraz
On some hill of despair the bonfire you kindle can light the great sky–though it’s true, of course, to make it burn you have to throw yourself in.
Galway Kinnell
One man with courage makes a majority.
Andrew Jackson
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
One lie does not cost you one truth, but the truth.
Friedrich Hebbel
One who finds no satisfaction in himself seeks for it in vain elsewhere.
La Rochefoucauld
One may be in as just possession of truths as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
Sir Thomas Browne
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliot
Our lives improve only when we take chances–and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.
Walter Anderson
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
Israel Zangwill
Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.
William Blake
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza
People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can’t do.
Ed Howe
People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.
Ken Kesey
People, like nails, lose their effectiveness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) French writer, moralist
Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
La Rochefoucauld
Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same–to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
Walt Whitman
Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.
Walter Elliott
Quality isn’t a thing. It is an event.
Robert Pirsig
Quality doesn’t improve by sitting on things.
Val Fitch
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
Should-haves solve nothing. It’s the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.
Alexandra Ripley
Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal, while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting at the last moment more vigorous efforts than before.
Polybius
Someday is not a day of the week.
anonymous
Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves.
Robert Frost
Sometimes being pushed to the wall gives you the momentum necessary to get over it!
Peter de Jaeger
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
St. Francis of Assisi
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
The most exhausting thing in my life is being insincere.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The best parachute folders are those who jump themselves.
anonymous
The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show.
Anonymous
The past is a ghost, the future a dream, all we ever have is now.
Bill Cosby
The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains proves that he has no brains of his own.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The mind cannot long act the role of the heart.
Francois de la Rochefoucauld
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.
Frederick Buechner
The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
Gerald Burrill
The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future.
Gifford Pinchot
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth–that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken
The truth will set you free. But before it does, it will make you angry.
Jerry Joiner
The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
John Ruskin
The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought.
Mahatma Gandhi
The longer the excuse, the less likely it’s the truth.
Robert Half
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
Theodore Rubin
The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
traditional
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
unknown
The worst-tempered people I’ve ever met were the people who knew they were wrong.
Wilson Mizner
There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur
There are two kinds of light–the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
James Thurber
There are risks and costs to a programme of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy
There is hardly anybody good for everything, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing.
Lord Chesterfield
There are two kinds of people: those who finish what they start, and so on.
Robert Byrne
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving
There’s nothing wrong with having nothing to say–unless you insist on saying it.
anonymous
These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.
Vernon Cooper, Lumbee tribe (Native American)
Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
Art Linkletter
Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.
Peacemaker, founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, ca. 1000 AD
This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
Gen. Omar Bradley
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare
Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.
Alexander Hamilton
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
Those who do not plan for the future will have to live through it anyway.
Len Fisher
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 Jung
To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw
To change your life; -Start immediately -Do it flamboyantly -No exceptions
William James
True silence is the rest of the mind. It is to the spirit what sleep is to the body–nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn
We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us.
David Seamands
We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
Jean Toomer
We have only one person to blame, and that’s each other.
Larry Breck of the NY Rangers, on who started a brawl during the Stanley Cup playoffs
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Max DuPree
We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.
Virginia Satir
When you pray for potatoes, grab a hoe.
David Jamieson’s Mom
When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.
George Fisher
When one finds oneself in a hole of one’s own making, it is a good time to examine the quality of the workmanship.
John Renmerde
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968
When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.
Pablo Picasso
When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
St Jerome
When they tell you to grow up, they mean to stop growing.
Tom Robbins
While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, another is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Henry C. Link
Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
Sophocles
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.
Kesgavan Nair
Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.
Baltasar Gracian
Words that enlighten are more precious than jewels.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
You can’t hold someone down without staying down with them.
Booker T. Washington
You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.
Charles Buxton
You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
Chinese proverb
You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.
Oliver Goldsmith