Greatest Thoughts

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
ALBERT CAMUS:
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get
knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
ALDOUS HUXLEY:
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from
the author's soul.
AMY LOWELL:
For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Boston Athenaeum
AMY LOWELL:
All books are either dreams or swords,

You can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
ANN RICHARDS:
I have a real soft spot in my heart for librarians and people who care about books.
ANNA GARLIN SPENCER :

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not
through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else
demoralized by it, as by nothing else.
BARBARA TUCHMAN:
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature
dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
BERTRAND RUSSELL:
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you
can boast about it.
CICERO:
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
DANIEL J. BOORSTEIN:
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can
take it to bed with you.
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.
ELIZABETH DREW:
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the
reading of it.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK:
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it

excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a
moral illumination.
EMILY DICKINSON:
There is no frigate like a book

To take us lands away.
FRANCIS BACON:
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
on and digested.
GEORG C. LICHTENBERG:
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
HARRIET MARTINEAU:
Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.
HENRY G. STRAUSS:
I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read
about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.
HENRY MILLER:
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept
in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum -- of both books and
money! But especially books, for books represent infinitely more than money. A book
is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with
mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched
threefold.
HENRY WARD BEECHER:
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully
furnishes a house.
JOHN RUSKIN:
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all
time.
JOHN RUSKIN:
A book worth reading is worth buying.
KATHARINE MANSFIELD:
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the
same books.
KATHLEEN NORRIS:
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes
that day happier.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU:
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
LENORE HERSHEY:
Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening,

seldom sinful, and permanently personal.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT:
She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.
MARGARET FULLER:
A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the
body.
MARK TWAIN:
There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after
year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth
being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself.
There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will
not tell itself.
MARK TWAIN:
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
MORTIMER ADLER:
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through,
but rather how many can get through to you.
MORTIMER ADLER:
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
MORTIMER ADLER:
If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot
expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
NICK BANTOCK:
Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books.
They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more
complex than Hampton Court's. Books ruled our lives. They were our demigods.
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:
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and
literature is not read.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON:
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use?
What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I
had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own
orbit, and made a satelite instead of a system.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually
read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
THEODORE PARKER:
The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest
way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great
thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
THEODORE PARKER:
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The
hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that comes from a great
thinker -- it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and with beauty.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING:
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds... In the
best books, great men talk to us, give us their most previous thought, and pour their
souls into ours. God be thanked for books.
BELL HOOKS:
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
ARISTOTLE:
Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and
to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right
way, that is not within everybody's power, that is not easy.
CARL SANDBURG:
Choose
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.
D. H. LAWRENCE:
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is
just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
ELIZABETH KENNY:
He who angers you conquers you.
ELIZABETH KENNY:
My mother used to say, "He who angers you, conquers you!" But my mother was a
saint.
EMILY DICKINSON:
Anger as soon as fed is dead --
'tis starving makes it fat.
EPICTETUS :
Reckon the days in which you have not been angry. I used to be angry every day;
now every other day; then every third and fourth day; and if you miss it so long as
thirty days, offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.
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.
FREDERICK BUECHNER:
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to
smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of
bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the
pain you are given and the pain you are giving back -- in many ways it is a feast fit
for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The
skeleton at the feast is you.
JAMES THURBER:
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
JOHN DRYDEN:
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us
from ourselves.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT:
I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still
try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.
[Character of Marmee in Little Women]
MARCUS AURELIUS:
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
THOMAS A KEMPIS:
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot
make yourself as you wish to be.
WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD:

Flying off the handle sometimes causes hammers and humans to lose their heads, as
well as their effectiveness.
WILLIAM BLAKE:
I was angry with my friend

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
A Poison Tree
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking
about myself and what I am going to say -- and two-thirds thinking about him and
what he is going to say.
COLETTE:
My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in
what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more
unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"
DANIEL DENNETT:
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
DAVID HUME:
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

GAY HENDRICKS:
Arguments are often like melodramas -- they have a predictable beginning, middle,
and end.
GAY HENDRICKS:
Most couples have not had hundreds of arguments; they've had the same argument
hundreds of times.
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.
JACK LYNCH:
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus
Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
JONATHAN KOZOL:
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher
JONATHAN SWIFT:
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
LEONARDO DA VINCI:
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his
intelligence; he is just using his memory.
MARIE EBNER VON ESCHENBACH:
Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.
MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH:
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
MARY PETTIBONE POOLE:
To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,

requires brains.
Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
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.
SAM ADAMS:
It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
DAVID HUME:
When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving
views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from
the grossest absurdities.
DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD:
The true means of being misled is to believe oneself finer than the others.
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.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE:
The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.
A person unlearns arrogance when he knows he is always among worthy human

beings; being alone fosters presumption. Young people are arrogant because they
always associate with their own peers, those who are all really nothing but who
would like to be very important.
One who is unassuming in dealing with people exhibits his arrogance all the more
strongly in dealing with things (city, state, society, age, mankind). That is his
revenge.
GEORGE ELIOT:
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
LAURA TERESA MARQUEZ:
Arrogance and rudeness are training wheels on the bicycle of life -- for weak people
who cannot keep their balance without them.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR:
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man
who is anxious about his virility.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD:
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature,
the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous
convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
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.
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.
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.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any
other one thing.
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.
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.
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.
COLLEEN C. BARRETT:
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
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.
DEMOSTHENES:
Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
DEMOSTHENES:
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to
be true.
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
EDWIN H. FRIEDMAN:
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work
with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on
syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in
which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving
toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the
choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the
real figures of speech.
ELLA WILLIAMS:
Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it.
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.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT:
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes
it happen.
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.
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.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU:
Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.
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
JAMES A. FROUDE:
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself
one.
JAMES YORKE:
The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.
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.
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.
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN:
No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Never give it.
You really can change the world if you care enough.
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.
MARTHA WASHINGTON:
The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our
circumstances.
MAYA LIN:
To fly, we have to have resistance.
MICHAEL KORDA:
To succeed, we must first believe that we can.
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI:
My life is an indivisible whole, and all my attitudes run into one another; and they all
have their rise in my insatiable love for mankind.
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.
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.
So is cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more remains.

RICHARD BACH:
Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
SPINOZA:
Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for
benevolence; confidence; and justice.
SUSAN J. BISSONETTE:
An optimist is the human personification of spring.
THOMAS ALVA EDISON:
Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
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.
WILLIAM JAMES:
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by
altering his attitude.
WILLIAM JAMES:
The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by
altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.
ALDOUS HUXLEY:
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition
into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to
the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it
confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it
bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his
words for actual things.
ANAÏS NIN:
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF:
Differences challenge assumptions.
BUDDHA:
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
CONFUCIUS:
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his
equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine
your own self.
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.
DEMOSTHENES:
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to
be true.
DENISE LEVERTOV:
Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made
them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.
ELEANOR CHAFFEE:
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
ELIAS CANETTI:
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
GARRISON KEILLOR:
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
H. H. THE DALAI LAMA:

To be aware of a single shortcoming in oneself is more useful than to be aware of a
thousand in someone else.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but
by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her
smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
HENRY MILLER:
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes
a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
HERB GOLDBERG:
The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner
prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that
it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware.
JAMES THURBER:
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
JESSAMYN WEST:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in
vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962
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!
LINDA HOGAN:
There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply
not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.
M. SCOTT PECK:
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI:
To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
MONICA BALDWIN:
The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the
twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the
certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen.
And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is
always there.
NIETZSCHE:
'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that' -- says my pride, and
remains adamant. At last -- memory yields.
RACHEL CARSON:
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening
of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of
wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
THICH NHAT HANH:
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real
miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day
we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white
clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a
miracle.
THICH NHAT HANH:
May our heart's garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.
WILLA CATHER:
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or
healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions
being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what
is there about us always. (Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927)
ALBERT CAMUS:
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an

eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
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:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental
emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Living Philosophies, 1931
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.
ANAIS NIN:
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is
always more mystery.
ANNE LAMOTT:
Joy is the best makeup.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER:
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how
to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I
know it is wrong.
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.
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.
CLAUDETTE COLBERT:
It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.
D. H. LAWRENCE:
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence
which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.
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.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE:
I said to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big
and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it -- I will make even busy New
Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
HELEN KELLER:
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but
are felt in the heart.
HENRY MILLER:
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes
a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
JEAN KERR:
I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough.
What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
JOHN KEATS:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
JOHN RUSKIN:
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless;
peacocks and lilies, for example.
KAHLIL GIBRAN:
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
KALIDASA:
Look to this Day!
KENNETH PATTON:
The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN, II:
Do you love me because I'm beautiful,

or am I am beautiful because you love me?
PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR:
The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
RACHEL CARSON:
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will
endure as long as life lasts.
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.
Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same all.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
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 C. FULLER :
Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issue of how our lives fit into the
greater cosmic scheme of things. This is true even when our questions never give
way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or
meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe
comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become
spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that
seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is
"spiritual" when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the
deepest meanings or powers governing life.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON:
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care
of themselves.
RUDYARD KIPLING:
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
SIR WALTER SCOTT:
Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
SOPHIA LOREN:
Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think
you've got.
THOMAS F. HEALEY:
Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead.
When Death claims the light of my brow,
No flowers of life will cheer me: instead
You may give me my roses now!
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the
heart asunder.
WILLA CATHER:
Oh, this is the joy of the rose: / That it blows, / And goes.
ANDREW KUNTZ:
I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world
behind, and focus... The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy
of challenge, and the challenge of endurance... The piece, when it is over, is not
what is made, but how it is made.
EDWIN H. FRIEDMAN:
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE:
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as
though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just
the place and time that the tide will turn.
HUGH MILLER:
Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
MARGARET CHASE SMITH:
When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.
MARY PETTIBONE POOLE:
To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,

requires brains.
MARY PICKFORD:
If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a
fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling
down, but the staying down.
MAY SARTON:
... without darkness

Nothing comes to birth,
As without light
Nothing flowers.
MAYA ANGELOU:
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage,
need not be lived again.
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.
STEVEN FOSTER:
You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How
can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the
return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has
changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not
incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been
flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of
the Vision Quest]
WALTER LINN:
It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do
when they don't have to.
WARREN BENNIS:
The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is
piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so
we must think anew and act anew.
ALAN COHEN:
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the
new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more
security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change
there is power.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
ALDOUS HUXLEY:
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's
your own self.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD:
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid
order.
ALICE WALKER:
One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from
the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding.
ALICE WALKER:
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
ALICE WALKER:
This is how change happens, though. It is a relay race, and we're very conscious of
that, that our job really is to do our part of the race, and then we pass it on, and
then someone picks it up, and it keeps going. And that is how it is. And we can do
this, as a planet, with the consciousness that we may not get it, you know, today,
but there's always a tomorrow. (interview broadcast on Nov. 11, 2008)
ALVIN TOFFLER:
In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated

information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized
monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model
to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result,
change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.
AMERICAN PROVERB:
It doesn't work to leap a twenty-foot chasm in two ten-foot jumps.
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.
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:
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become

automatons. We cease to grow.
ANAIS NIN:
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than
the risk it took to blossom.
ANDY WARHOL:
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
ANNE FRANK:
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to
improve the world.
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.
ANNE WILSON SCHAEF:
Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.
ANTHONY J. D'ANGELO:
Become a student of change. It is the only thing that will remain constant.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER:
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
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.
BARACK OBAMA:
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are
the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
CHARLES DARWIN:
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the
one most responsive to change.
CHARLES DUBOIS:
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for
what we could become.
CHARLES KETTERING:
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN:
... while we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under
our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.
EDWIN H. FRIEDMAN:
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT:
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is
how character is built.
ELLEN GLASGOW:
All change is not growth; as all movement is not forward.
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—
EPICTETUS:
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
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.
FELIX ADLER:
We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The
world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:
When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
G. K. CHESTERTON:
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should
have a new soul.
G. K. CHESTERTON:
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them
as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of
change.
GENERAL ERIC SHINSEKI:
If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. [Chief of Staff, U.
S. Army]
GEORG C. LICHTENBERG:
I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must
change if they are to get better.
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 WILL:
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
GLORIA STEINEM:
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
GLORIA STEINEM:
If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?
HARRIET LERNER:
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable
from social and political change.
HARRIET TUBMAN:
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you
the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the
world.
HELEN KELLER:
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
HENRI BERGSON:
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself
endlessly.
Things do not change, we change.
HENRY STEELE COMMAGER:
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires
change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and
the ability to satisfy them.
HERACLITUS:
You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.
ca. 500 BCE
HERACLITUS:
All is flux; nothing stays still.
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.
IRENE PETER:
Just because everything is different doesn't mean that everything has changed.
IVY BAKER PRIEST:
The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the
beginning.
JAMES BALDWIN:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is
always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down
rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because
we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to
each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the
sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE:
We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as
remaining stationary in this life.
JAMES YORKE:
The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.
JOHN DEWEY:
The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the
object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot
be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man
is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of
social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.
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.
KALIDASA:

Look to this Day!
KATHARINE BUTLER HATHAWAY:
A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new
places. One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.
KENNETH KAUNDA:
The inability of those in power to still the voices of their own consciences is the great
force leading to change.
LEO TOLSTOY:
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
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:
MADAME DE STAEL:
The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals. (L'esprit
humain fait progres toujours, mais c'est progres en spirale.)
MAIREAD MAGUIRE:
\We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same
time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us
takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving,
and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change
as those around us can change too.
MARCUS AURELIUS:
The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.
MARGARET MEAD:
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
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.
You really can change the world if you care enough.
If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to
change it You just do it one step at a time.
MARILYN FERGUSON:
It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's
that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus
when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.
MARK TWAIN:
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
MARY ANTIN, 1912:
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the
birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are
slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical
birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
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.
MAYA ANGELOU:
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage,
need not be lived again.
MITSUGI SAOTOME:
MORTIMER ADLER:
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue
growing as we continue to live.
NANCY ASTOR:
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or
nothing.
NELSON MANDELA:
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI:
I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.
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.
OVID:
All things change; nothing perishes.
PABLO PICASSO:
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
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:
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:
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact
with a new idea.
PEARL S. BUCK:
I am comforted by life's stability, by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed

new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge. It is good to
know our universe. What is new is only new to us.
PEARL S. BUCK:
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

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.
PETER SENGE:
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held
internal images of how the world works ... images that limit us to familiar ways of
thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models --
surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works --
promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
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.
Life is a progress, and not a station.
RICHARD BACH:
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
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 FROST:
Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
ROBERT FROST:
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
SAUL ALINSKY:
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum
of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive
friction of conflict.
STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH:
There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's
solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people
daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their
deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
STEPHEN SIGMUND:
Learn wisdom from the ways of a seedling. A seedling which is never hardened off
through stressful situations will never become a strong productive plant.
STEVEN FOSTER:
You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How
can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the
return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has
changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not
incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been
flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of
the Vision Quest]
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS:
I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can
both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by
wind, by water, through time.
THOMAS HARDY:
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by

change.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and
institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that
becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new
truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of
circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might
as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized
society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
THOMAS A KEMPIS:
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot
make yourself as you wish to be.
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
TONY ROBBINS:
If we habitually focus on how to improve things that are already great, can you see
how this spirit can transform ourselves, our organizations, families and communities?
TRYON EDWARDS:
He that never changes his opinions, never corrects his mistakes, and will never be
wiser on the morrow than he is today.
UNKNOWN:
In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art gallery unattended,
for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his
old masterpieces.
UNKNOWN:
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
V. S. NAIPAUL:
The world is always in movement.
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.
W.E.B. DU BOIS:
The most important thing to remember is this: To be ready at any moment to give
up what you are for what you might become.
WASHINGTON IRVING:
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have
often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's
position, and be bruised in a new place.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
WOODROW WILSON:
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
ABIGAIL VAN BUREN:
The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him
any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of
it; the tree is the real thing.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.
ANNE FRANK:
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final
forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN:
There never was a good knife made of bad steel.
CICERO:
It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends

harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.
CLARENCE DARROW:
With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other
organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for
honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of
character in men, than any other association of men.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT:
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is
how character is built.
FAITH BALDWIN:
Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness.
GOETHE:
Character develops itself in the stream of life.
H. JACKSON BROWN:
Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to
some extent, a gift. Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build
it, piece by piece -- by thought, choice, courage, and determination.
HELEN KELLER:
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial
and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and
success achieved.
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?
JAMES A. FROUDE:
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself
one.
LILLIAN HELLMAN:
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long
ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no
comfortable place in any political group. [Letter to the US House of Representatives
Committee on Un-American Activities, 1952]
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.
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.
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.
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.
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI:
The Roots of Violence:

Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.
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?"
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of
character.
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)
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 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?
SAM ADAMS:
It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

SCOTT ALEXANDER:
All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay
away from easy.
THOMAS CARLYLE:
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the
mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
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.
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS:
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible
value to him.
WOODROW WILSON:
If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take
care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its
cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.
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.
BERT LESTON TAYLOR:

A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.
BETTE MIDLER:
Cherish forever what makes you unique, ‘cuz you're really a yawn if it goes.
CHARLOTTE WHITTON:
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is

dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
ELLEN PARR:
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
ERIC HOFFER:
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.
FRITZ REDL:
Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we

remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested
in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain
working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what
a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is. Research has shown
that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much
frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive
rejection of the whole show.
When We Deal With Children
GEORGE BUSH:
What's wrong with being a boring kind of guy?

LEO TOLSTOY:
Boredom: the desire for desires.
Anna Karenina
LIN YUTANG:
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are
merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
METALLICA:
Boredom comes from a boring mind.
SAUL STEINBERG:
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding
boredom is one of our most important purposes.
SIR CECIL BEATON:
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
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.
SUSAN SONTAG:
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather
than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
On Photography
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes
to the top.
VOLTAIRE:
All kinds are good except the kind that bores you.
FRANKLIN DELANO
ROOSEVELT:
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
GRACIÁN:
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
HORACE:
Whatever advice you give, be brief.
MARK TWAIN:
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the
diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is
worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the
difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that
ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
MARK TWAIN:
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is
the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let
fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I
don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They
weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person,
is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
SOPHOCLES:
A short saying often contains much wisdom.
WOODROW WILSON:
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three
days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
AFRICAN PROVERB:
It takes a village to raise a child.
AMBROSE BIERCE:
Childhood: The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and
the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the
remorse of age.
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:
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final
forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
ANNIE SULLIVAN:
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
BILL COSBY:
Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.
BILL VAUGHN:
A three-year-old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar
set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
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.
CHINESE PROVERB:
One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.
CLARENCE DARROW:
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our
children.
COLETTE:
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in
their place.
DOROTHY PARKER:
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant --
and let the air out of the tires.
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 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.
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.
ERMA BOMBECK:
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a
child.
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression
FLORIDA SCOTT-MAXWELL:
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of
improvement.
FRANKLIN P. JONES:
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
GARRISON KEILLOR:
Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering,
averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never
wasted.
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as
a warning and not as an example.
GEORGE SANTAYANA:
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
GEORGE W. BUSH:
I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER:
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
GOLDA MEIR:
At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the
work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart
is rent.
GROUCHO MARX:
A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
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.
HERBERT HOOVER:
Children are our most valuable natural resource.
HODDING CARTER:
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots;
the other, wings.
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS:
If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters
very much.
JAMES BALDWIN:
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never
failed to imitate them.
JAMES BALDWIN:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is
always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down
rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because
we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to
each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the
sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
JANE NELSON:
Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first
we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or
treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?
JILL BENSLEY:
The most effective form of birth control I know is spending the day with my kids.
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.
JOHN J. PLOMP:
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have
answers.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER:
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six
children and no theories.
KAHLIL GIBRAN:
Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life's
longing for itself.
KORAN:
Wealth and children are the adornment of life.
LEO ROSTEN:
You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter
how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never
really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we
laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath
the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is
still best described by fairy tales.
LOUIS PASTEUR:
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he

is, and respect for what he may become.
LYDIA MARIA CHILD:
Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!
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.
If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In
reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could
make it without our mortgage reduction?
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.
MARK TWAIN:
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped
teething.
MARK TWAIN - ATTRIBUTED IN ERROR:
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to
have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how
much the old man had learned in seven years.
MAUREEN HAWKINS:
Before you were conceived I wanted you

Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life.
MICHAEL LEVINE:
Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a
pianist.
P. J. O'ROURKE:
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came
from and refuse to tell you where they're going.
PABLO PICASSO:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
PAMELA GLENCONNER:
Bitter are the tears of a child: Sweeten them.
Deep are the thoughts of a child: Quiet them.
Sharp is the grief of a child: Take it from him.
Soft is the heart of a child: Do not harden it.
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.
RABBINICAL SAYING:
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
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 CARSON:
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening
of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of
wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.
ROGER LEWIN:
Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
SARAH NORCLIFFE CLEGHORN:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
[from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]
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.
SIDONIE GRUENBERG:
To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He
has to have confidence in himself as an individual.
ST. FRANCIS XAVIER:
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.
THEODORE HESBURGH:
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
THICH NHAT HANH:
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real
miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day
we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white
clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a
miracle.
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.
UNKNOWN:
- from the Institute for Stork Research and Science

Two different theories exist concerning the origin of children: the theory of Sexual
reproduction, and the theory of the stork. Many people believe in the theory of
sexual reproduction because they have been taught this theory at school. In reality,
however, many of the world's leading scientists are in favor of the theory of the
stork. If the theory of sexual reproduction is taught in schools, it must only be taught
as a theory and not as the truth. Alternative theories, such as the theory of the
stork, must also be taught.
This entry continued ...

UNKNOWN:
Some children's answers to church school questions - from the Church of England:

VICTORIA WAGNER:
A young child is, indeed, a true scientist, just one big question mark. What? Why?
How? I never cease to marvel at the recurring miracle of growth, to be fascinated by
the mystery and wonder of this brave enthusiasm.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:
It is a wise father that knows his own child.
ANDRÉ GIDE:
The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.
BARBARA DE ANGELIS:
Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
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
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 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 SANDBURG:
Choose
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.
CARTER HEYWARD:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling;
not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is
active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with
one's friends and enemies.

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
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.
ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS:
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the
consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
ELIZABETH DOLE:
What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is
made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once
policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.
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.

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.
INGRID BERGMAN:
You must train your intuition -- you must trust the small voice inside you which tells
you exactly what to say, what to decide.
JOHN DEWEY:
The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation

through choice of action.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH:
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous
and the unpalatable.
KENNETH PATTON (ADAPTED):
By the choices and acts of our lives, we create the person that we are and the faces
that we wear. By the choices and acts of our lives we give to the world wherein our
lives are lived, hoping that our neighbors will find our contributions to be of worth,
and hoping that the world will be a little more gracious for our time in it.
LEO BUSCAGLIA:
What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to
choose life.
MAE WEST:
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried
before.
MARGARET SANGER:
When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance
or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.
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.
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI:
Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES:
Consciously or unconsciously we all strive to make the kind of a world we like.
ORIGEN:
The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.
OSCAR WILDE:
I can resist everything except temptation.
PAUL TILLICH:
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.
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.
RENE DESCARTES:
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest
virtues.
ROBERT COLES:
SIMONE WEIL:
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
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.
VIKTOR FRANKL:
W. H. AUDEN:
To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith.
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.
ANNE MORRISS:
The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love.
(part of a quote from The Way I See It #76, Starbucks Coffee)
CARTER HEYWARD:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling;
not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is
active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with
one's friends and enemies.

EDWARD EVERETT HALE:
I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do
The something that I can do.
EUGENE V. DEBS:
Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite
foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of
vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all
sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of
results.
FRANCIS BACON:
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
HIGH EAGLE:
In life, many thoughts are born in the course of a moment, an hour, a day. Some are
dreams, some visions. Often, we are unable to distinguish between them. To some,
they are the same; however, not all dreams are visions. Much energy is lost in
fanciful dreams that never bear fruit. But visions are messages from the Great Spirit,
each for a different purpose in life. Consequently, one person's vision may not be
that of another. To have a vision, one must be prepared to receive it, and when it
comes, to accept it. Thus when these inner urges become reality, only then can
visions be fulfilled. The spiritual side of life knows everyone's heart and who to trust.
How could a vision ever be given to someone to harbor if that person could not be
trusted to carry it out. The message is simple: commitment precedes vision.
LEO BUSCAGLIA:
What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to
choose life.
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.
You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can
every day.
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.
Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?
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.
PRINCESS DIANA:
Only do what your heart tells you.

ROLLO MAY:
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic

one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
STEPHEN COVEY:
Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline,

carrying it out.
TALMUD (ATTRIBUTED):
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy,
now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to abandon it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.
Declaration of Independence
VINCE LOMBARDI:
Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a

company work, a society work, a civilization work.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE:
Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they
ought to be done.
HENRY WARD BEECHER:
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL:
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have
education without common sense.
RUDYARD KIPLING:
I always try to believe the best of everybody -- it saves so much trouble.
WILL ROGERS:
Common sense ain't common.
ADRIENNE RICH:
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ALVIN TOFFLER:
In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated

information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized
monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model
to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result,
change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.
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
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH:
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep

after.
CLARENCE DARROW:
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
EDWARD R. MURROW:
People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.
EDWARD R. MURROW:
The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the
relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted
with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
EDWIN H. FRIEDMAN:
ERNEST HEMINGWAY:
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT:
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
The problem with communication ... is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
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.
HILDEGARD GOOS-MAYR:
Generally speaking, the first nonviolent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other
side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and
exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in
dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him. At every step in the nonviolent
struggle, at every level we try tirelessly to establish a dialogue, or reestablish it if it
has broken down. When I say 'the other side,' that could be a group of persons or a
government.
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY:
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
JOHN DEWEY:
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and
communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy,
some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will
find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
JONATHAN SWIFT:
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY:
The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
KIN HUBBARD:
Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it
didn't change once in a while.
MARCEL PROUST:
We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.
One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too
much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think
before I talk.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE:
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
PEARL S. BUCK:
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
PLATO:
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say
something.
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.
ROBERT GREELEAF:
Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
ROBERT GREENLEAF:
Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
ROLLO MAY:
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual

valuing.
RUDYARD KIPLING:
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
SHARON SCHUSTER:
When we have the courage to speak out – to break our silence – we inspire the rest
of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views.
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.
WILLA CATHER:
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
WOODROW WILSON:
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three
days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
ABORIGINAL ACTIVISTS
GROUP, QUEENSLAND, 1970S:
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come
because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Often attributed to Lila Watson, who has said she was "not comfortable being
credited for something that had been born of a collective process" - the attribution
here is the one she accepts.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one
uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.
ALFRED TENNYSON:
I am a part of all that I have met.
ANNA GARLIN SPENCER:

The earth is ready, the time is ripe, for the authoritative expression of the feminine
as well as the masculine interpretation of that common social consensus which is
slowly writing justice in the State and fraternity in the social order.
BLACK ELK:
Hear me, four quarters of the world - a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk
the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to
understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.
(1863-1950) Oglala Sioux holy man
The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to
society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
CHINESE PROVERB:
One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.
CICERO:
We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human
race.
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
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.
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.
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 H. W. BUSH:
I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that
are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.
GERTRUDE STEIN:
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others
they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
GROUCHO MARX:
I would never belong to a group that would accept someone like me as a member.
HH THE DALAI LAMA:
Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who
have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us
individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner
peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

HAROLD KUSHNER:
What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to
another.
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.
JOHN DEWEY:
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and
communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy,
some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will
find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON:
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a
right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in
the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-
respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a
place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being
a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of
civilization. It is what we seek today.
M. SCOTT PECK:
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without

vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
MARGARET MEAD:
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
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.
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.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON:
In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to
heal. In every heart there is the power to do it.
MARK MORRISON-REED:
The religious community is essential, for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that
must be seen. Together, our vision widens and strength is renewed.
An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly
accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the
community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
MITSUGI SAOTOME:
MOTHER TERESA:
Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints,
but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient
with each other's faults and failures.
POPE PAUL VI:
The important role of union organizations must be admitted: their object is the
representation of the various categories of workers, their lawful collaboration in the
economic advance of society, and the development of the sense of their
responsibility for the realization of the common good.
[source]
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee
which is bad for the hive.

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
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
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.
RUMI:
Come out of the circle of time

And into the circle of love.
SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR:
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the
result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads
from one to another that creates something.
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]
SHARON WELCH:
An appropriate symbol for the process of celebrating life, enduring limits, and
resisting injustice ... is the beloved community.... The beloved community names the
matrix within which life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over
injustice lay the groundwork for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance.
From within the matrix of beloved community, there is a solid basis for social critique
and self criticism: the life-giving love constitutive of solidarity with the oppressed
and love of oneself. [A 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?"
STARHAWK:
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-
remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time.
Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open
to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever
we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to
do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of
healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS:
I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can
both create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by
wind, by water, through time.
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.
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other
human beings as we take our place among them.
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
WENDELL BERRY:
We clasp the hands of those that go before us,

And the hands of those who come after us.
We enter the little circle of each other's arms
And the larger circle of lovers,
Whose hands are joined in a dance,
And the larger circle of all creatures,
Passing in and out of life,
Who move also in a dance,
To a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it
Except in fragments
WILLIAM PICKENS:
Living together is an art.
speech, meeting of Congregationalists, Oak Park, Illinois, November 2, 1932

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:
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.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN:
One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol
of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast
gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for
each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
ARNOLD SCHOPENHAUER:
Compassion is the basis of morality.
ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN:
Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.
BARACK OBAMA:
You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we
should talk more about our empathy deficit -- the ability to put ourselves in someone
else's shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us --
the child who's hungry, the steelworker who's been laid-off, the family who lost the
entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this
-- when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight
of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers -- it becomes harder
not to act; harder not to help.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI:
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
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
DANIEL GOLEMAN:
The act of compassion begins with full attention, just as rapport does. You have to
really see the person. If you see the person, then naturally, empathy arises. If you
tune into the other person, you feel with them. If empathy arises, and if that person
is in dire need, then empathic concern can come. You want to help them, and then
that begins a compassionate act. So I'd say that compassion begins with attention.
DIANE BERKE:
The major block to compassion is the judgment in our minds. Judgment is the mind's
primary tool of separation.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON:
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
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.
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.

with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong.
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because some day in life you will have been all of these.
How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong.
HH THE DALAI LAMA:
Compassion is the radicalism of our time.
HH THE DALAI LAMA:
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy,

practice compassion.
JIM ROHN:
The more you care, the stronger you can be.
JOANNA MACY:
Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of

compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it's uncomfortable. And the
avoidance produces psychic numbing -- resistance to experiencing our pain for the
world and other beings.
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.
MAIREAD MAGUIRE:
\We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same
time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us
takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving,
and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change
as those around us can change too.
MARTIN LOWENTHAL:
Compassion is a foundation for sharing our aliveness and building a more humane
world.
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.
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
PEMA CHODRON:
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to
discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is
huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is
there, as well as how much space.
PETER SINGER:
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in
suffering the animals are our equals.
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE:
...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with
us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and
preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear,
limitless compassion for all beings.
SPINOZA:
Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for
benevolence; confidence; and justice.
THOMAS AQUINAS:
I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON:
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only
object of good government.
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.
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.
VIKTOR FRANKL:
ZELDA FITZGERALD:
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.
JANIS JOPLIN:
Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

MARY PARKER FOLLETT:
There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and
integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither
side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get
what they wish.
ROBERT COLES:
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.
Save Me the Waltz, 1932

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.
ERIK H. ERIKSON:
Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of
being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is
wounded, trust impaired.
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
No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Never give it.
ROBERT COLES:
SIDONIE GRUENBERG:
To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He
has to have confidence in himself as an individual.
VIRGINIA WOOLF:
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this
imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that
other people are inferior to oneself.
ALBERT EINSTEIN:
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.
ANN LANDERS:
All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of
making love. Good battle is objective and honest--never vicious or cruel. Good battle
is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal
partnership.
Ann Landers Says Truth Is Stranger..., 1968
BERTRAND RUSSELL:
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I
expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In
these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
Education and the Social Order
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.
COLETTE:
My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in
what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more
unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"
DANNY DEVITO:
There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to
someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?
The War of the Roses
DANTE ALEGHIERI:
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises
maintain their neutrality.
DAVID FRIEDMAN:
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally
employed only by small children and large nations.
DAVID HUME:
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

DOROTHY THOMPSON:
Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for
responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives
to violence.
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.
EVELYN BEATRICE HALL:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
(paraphrasing Voltaire)
HAMILTON MABIE:
Don't be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against; not with; the wind.
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
HERBERT BUTTERFIELD:
But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant
organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find
that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still
deeper hatred and animosity.
INDIRA GANDHI:
You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
JOHN DEWEY:
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates

to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and
contriving.
JONATHAN KOZOL:
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
On Being a Teacher, 1981
M. SCOTT PECK:
[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.
True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
MARY PARKER FOLLETT:

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and
integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither
side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get
what they wish.
MELDRICK LEWIS:
If you ain't never pick up the sword, you ain't never have to worry about fallin' on it.
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI:
Non-cooperation is a measure of discipline and sacrifice, and it demands respect for

the opposite views.
ROBERT FROST:
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
SAUL ALINSKY:
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum
of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive
friction of conflict.
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]
THEODORE ADORNO:
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious

harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the
contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
THOMAS PAINE:
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap,
we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the
man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave
by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm,
and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
WALTER LIPPMANN:
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING:
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by
conflict.

Greatest Thoughts

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Greatest Thoughts

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

All books are either dreams or swords,

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

ANNA GARLIN SPENCER :

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it

There is no frigate like a book

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

HENRY WARD BEECHER:

A book worth reading is worth buying.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU:

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening,

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

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

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

[A] lawyer without books would be like a workman without tools.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING:

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

He who angers you conquers you.

Anger as soon as fed is dead --

'tis starving makes it fat.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT:

WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD:

I was angry with my friend

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY:

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

MARIE EBNER VON ESCHENBACH:

MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH:

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

MARY PETTIBONE POOLE:

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

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

Nor knowest thou what argument

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT:

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

A person unlearns arrogance when he knows he is always among worthy human

LAURA TERESA MARQUEZ:

STEPHEN JAY GOULD:

WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR.:

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we

Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.

For everything there is a season,

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT:

H.H. THE DALAI LAMA:

HENRY DAVID THOREAU:

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN:

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN:

You really can change the world if you care enough.

To fly, we have to have resistance.

To succeed, we must first believe that we can.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

RALPH WALDO EMERSON:

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: