Monday, 22 August 2011

Vanity

Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this. ~Blaise Pascal


Vanity is the quicksand of reason ~George Sand


The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. ~Thomas Wolfe


Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. ~Benjamin Franklin


There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it. ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898


Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Beauty's sister is vanity, and its daughter lust. ~Author Unknown


Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay. ~François de la Rochefoucauld


Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it. ~John Adams


There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. ~Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton


Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you. ~Miguel De Unamuno


To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life. ~Lord Chesterfield


Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory. ~Joseph Conrad


We speak little if not egged on by vanity. ~François de la Rochefoucauld


The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. ~Henri Bergson


If vanity does not overthrow all our virtues, at least she makes them totter. ~François de la Rochefoucauld


Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty. ~Louis Kronenberger


Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. ~Robert Louis Stevenson


What makes the vanity of others insupportable is that it wounds our own. ~François de la Rochefoucauld


In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity;
On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools - that's vanity.
~Robert Browning


Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company. ~François de la Rochefoucauld


Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action: and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life. ~Benjamin Franklin

Thrift

Thrift is not an affair of the pocket, but an affair of character. ~S.W. Straus


Thrift comes too late when you find it at the bottom of your purse. ~Seneca


Thrift was never more necessary in the world's history than it is today. ~Francis H. Sisson


Whatever thrift is, it is not avarice. Avarice is not generous; and, after all, it is the thrifty people who are generous. ~Lord Rosebery


The thrift that does not make a man charitable sours into avarice. ~M.W. Harrison


Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character. ~Calvin Coolidge


A bargain ain't a bargain unless it's something you need. ~Sidney Carroll, A Big Hand for the Little Lady


Be thrifty, but not covetous. ~George Herbert


By sowing frugality we reap liberty, a golden harvest. ~Agesilaus


I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living. ~John D. Rockefeller


Cannot people realize how large an income is thrift? ~Cicero


Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty. ~Samuel Johnson


Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power. ~Orison Swett Marden


He who does not economize will have to agonize. ~Confucius


Frugality is misery in disguise. ~Publilius Syrus


Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. ~Benjamin Franklin


We are not to judge thrift solely by the test of saving or spending. If one spends what he should prudently save, that certainly is to be deplored. But if one saves what he should prudently spend, that is not necessarily to be commended. A wise balance between the two is the desired end. ~Owen Young

Safety

Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. ~William Shakespeare


For safety is not a gadget but a state of mind. ~Eleanor Everet


Safety doesn't happen by accident. ~Author Unknown


"Safety First" is "Safety Always." ~Charles M. Hayes


Better a thousand times careful than once dead. ~Proverb


Precaution is better than cure. ~Edward Coke


As soon as you see a mistake and don't fix it, it becomes your mistake. ~Author Unknown


Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy. ~Author Unknown


Who can hope to be safe? who sufficiently cautious?
Guard himself as he may, every moment's an ambush.
~Horace


Safety means first aid to the uninjured. ~Author Unknown


Accidents, and particularly street and highway accidents, do not happen - they are caused. ~Ernest Greenwood


Prepare and prevent, don't repair and repent. ~Author Unknown


Chance takers are accident makers. ~Author Unknown


Hug your kids at home, but belt them in the car. ~Author Unknown


It's better to crash into a nap than to nap into a crash. ~Author Unknown


Luck runs out but safety is good for life. ~Author Unknown


There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. ~James Thurber


Accidents hurt - safety doesn't. ~Author Unknown


Working safely may get old, but so do those who practice it. ~Author Unknown


The door to safety swings on the hinges of common sense. ~Author Unknown


Working without safety is a dead-end job. ~Author Unknown


Know safety, no injury. No safety, know injury. ~Author Unknown


We now have unshakable conviction that accident causes are man-made and that a manmade problem can be solved by men and women. ~W.H. Cameron


Carelessness doesn't bounce; it shatters. ~Terri Guillemets


Safety never takes a holiday. ~Author Unknown


Danger never takes a vacation. ~Author Unknown


When you gamble with safety, you bet your life. ~Author Unknown


If safety is a joke, then death is the punchline. ~Paul Laforest


Is better to lose one minute in life... than to lose life in a minute. ~Author Unknown


While on a ladder, never step back to admire your work. ~Author Unknown


Hearing protection is a sound investment. ~Author Unknown


To learn about eye protection, ask someone who has one. ~Author Unknown


Safety glasses: making foresight 20/20. ~Author Unknown


Your safety gears are between your ears. ~Author Unknown


Broken tools can be replaced. You can't. ~Author Unknown


Personal protective equipment is self-defense. ~Author Unknown


Tomorrow - your reward for working safely today. ~Author Unknown


Unsafe acts will keep you in stitches. ~Author Unknown


Don't learn safety by accident. ~Author Unknown


If you mess up, 'fess up. ~Author Unknown


Road sense is the offspring of courtesy and the parent of safety. ~Australian Traffic Rule, quoted in Quotations for Special Occasions by Maud van Buren, 1938


Safety is as simple as ABC - Always Be Careful. ~Author Unknown


Safety isn't expensive, its priceless. ~Author Unknown


Be alert! Accidents hurt. ~Author Unknown


Alert today, alive tomorrow. ~Author Unknown


Better dead sure than sure dead. ~Author Unknown


If you don't think it's safe, it probably isn't. ~Author Unknown


When safety is a factor, call in a contractor. ~Author Unknown


Wishing won't keep you safe - safety will. ~Author Unknown


Working safely is like breathing - if you don't, you die. ~Author Unknown


The safest risk is the one you didn't take. ~Author Unknown


Safety isn't just a slogan, it's a way of life. ~Author Unknown

Perfection

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing. ~Harriet Braiker


Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks. ~Goethe


No one is perfect... that's why pencils have erasers. ~Author Unknown


Nothing that is complete breathes. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault. ~John Henry Newman


Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen


To escape criticism - do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. ~Elbert Hubbard


Only in grammar can you be more than perfect. ~William Safire


Sometimes... when you hold out for everything, you walk away with nothing. ~From the television show Ally McBeal


Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. ~Henry van Dyke


Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny. ~Carl Schurz, address, Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1859


Gold cannot be pure, and people cannot be perfect. ~Chinese Proverb


Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. ~Confucius, Analects


The most difficult part of attaining perfection is finding something to do for an encore. ~Author Unknown


When you aim for perfection, you discover it's a moving target. ~George Fisher


Once you accept the fact that you're not perfect, then you develop some confidence. ~Rosalynn Carter


There are no perfect men in this world, only perfect intentions. ~Pen Densham, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves


The imperfections of a man, his frailties, his faults, are just as important as his virtues. You can't separate them. They're wedded. ~Henry Miller


Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen? ~Alison Bechdel, 1990 Dykes to Watch Out For calendar (Thanks, Chelsea)


The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye. ~Winston Churchill


The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form. ~Stanley J. Randall


They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds. ~Wilt Chamberlain


Always live up to your standards - by lowering them, if necessary. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


He who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. ~Charles Lamb


Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends. ~Chinese Proverb


Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect. ~Nicholas Chamfort


The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. ~Matthew Arnold


I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. ~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Player Piano


Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues. ~Hugh Prather


Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


Striving to better, oft we mar what's well. ~William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605


Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. ~Salvador Dali


All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. ~William Faulkner


A good garden may have some weeds. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732


Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence. ~Vince Lombardi


I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being. ~Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault), The Garden of Epicurus, 1894


Congratulations! You're not perfect! It's ridiculous to want to be perfect anyway. But then, everybody's ridiculous sometimes, except perfect people. You know what perfect is? Perfect is not eating or drinking or talking or moving a muscle or making even the teensiest mistake. Perfect is never doing anything wrong - which means never doing anything at all. Perfect is boring! So you're not perfect! Wonderful! Have fun! Eat things that give you bad breath! Trip over your own shoelaces! Laugh! Let somebody else laugh at you! Perfect people never do any of those things. All they do is sit around and sip weak tea and think about how perfect they are. But they're really not one-hundred-percent perfect anyway. You should see them when they get the hiccups! Phooey! Who needs 'em? You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person. Good people are hard to find nowadays. And they're a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week. ~Stephen Manes, Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days!


He that will have a perfect brother must resign himself to remain brotherless. ~Italian Proverb


You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out. ~Martha Graham


One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club


When nobody around you seems to measure up, it's time to check your yardstick. ~Bill Lemley


Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on. ~Ed Howe


Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways. ~Samuel McChord Crothers

People

The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody. ~Benjamin Franklin


What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. ~Susan Sontag


You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door. ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887


A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. ~Winston Churchill


A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. ~Arthur Miller


The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne


Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world. ~Walter Savage Landor


I'm the strayest dog you'll ever meet. ~Daniel, @blindedpoet


He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. ~Winston Churchill


I don't know that there are haunted houses. I know that there are dark staircases and haunted people. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch. ~Walt Whitman


If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others. ~Francois duc de la Rochefoucauld


A hundred men together are the hundredth part of a man. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation. ~W. Somerset Maugham


Freaks are the much needed escape from the humdrum. They are poetry. ~Albert Perry


A man never knows how to say goodbye; a woman never knows when to say it. ~Helen Rowland


In general, of course, a stranger who tries to get you into an automobile is anything but noble, and in general a person who quotes great American novelists is anything but treacherous, and in general a man who says you needn't worry about money, or a man who smokes cigarettes, is somewhere in between. ~Lemony Snicket


His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets. ~Dorothy Parker


Groups of people are like a massive Rock, Paper, Scissors war. ~Daniel, @blindedpoet


History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. ~Abba Eban


Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank? ~Walt Whitman

Peace

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


If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. ~Mother Teresa


Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


One must look hard through history to find when a clear understanding of the truth moved anyone to fire the first shot. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots. ~Napoleon Bonaparte


The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war. ~Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit


Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me.
~Seymour Miller & Jill Jackson, "Let There Be Peace on Earth," 1955


I take it that what all men are really after is some form of, perhaps only some formula of, peace. ~James Conrad


The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past; between those who open their arms and those who are determined to clench their fists. ~William J. Clinton, 1997


The pacifist's task today is to find a method of helping and healing which provides a revolutionary constructive substitute for war. ~Vera Brittain, 1964


You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. ~Attributed to both Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi


Peace hath higher tests of manhood
Than battle ever knew.
~John Greenleaf Whittier


Five great enemies to peace inhabit with us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace. ~Francesco Petrarch


Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war. ~John Andrew Holmes, Wisdom in Small Doses


If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," there would be very few hon. gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless. ~Mr. Graham, 1914, Canadian House of Parliament member, commonly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi as "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


There is one armor that the world of men and women, as a world, has never yet put on. The churches have long bungled with its fastenings, but the world has gone unfended, and few have been those in whose hands the mystical sword of the spirit has shone with daily use. This armor, waiting to be worn, is the armor of brotherhood and sacrifice, the world of unselfishness, a conquering sword, with the power, where used, to unite the world in love. And there are none who may not put it on. ~M.A. DeWolfe Howe


I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it. ~Dwight Eisenhower


Lord, bid war's trumpet cease;
Fold the whole earth in peace.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes


We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace? ~J. Ramsay MacDonald


We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


Right is more precious than peace. ~Woodrow Wilson


Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. ~Robert Fulghum


In the name of peace
They waged the wars
Ain't they got no shame
~Nikki Giovanni


Let us love the world to peace. ~Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994


A warless world will come as men develop warless hearts. ~Charles Wesley Burns


We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament. ~J. Ramsay MacDonald

Patience

A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains. ~Dutch Proverb


How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? ~Paul Sweeney


Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead. ~Mac McCleary


Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off. ~Author Unknown


Beware the fury of a patient man. ~John Dryden, Absolam and Achitophel, 1680


Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. ~Lord Chesterfield


Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue. ~Ambrose Bierce


You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. ~Franklin P. Jones


Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience. ~George-Louis de Buffon


Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. ~John Quincy Adams


Patience is the companion of wisdom. ~St. Augustine


Patience is also a form of action. ~Auguste Rodin


How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
~William Shakespeare, Othello, 1604


One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life. ~Chinese Proverb


Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health. ~Michel de Montaigne

Past

A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body. ~André Maurois


The past is not a package one can lay away. ~Emily Dickinson


Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird. ~Paul Eldridge


The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~Lesley P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953


The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables


The one charm of the past is that it is the past. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray


The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. ~Wendell Berry


Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. ~Virginia Woolf


Look not at the days gone by with a forlorn heart. They were simply the dots we can now connect with our present, to help us draw the outline of a beautiful tomorrow. ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com


I find in old age that it's possible to revisit the past, the one requirement being that you come as you are. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Bring the past only if you are going to build from it. ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. ~Golda Meir


God has no power over the past except to cover it with oblivion. ~Pliny the Elder


We need not destroy the past. It is gone. ~John Cage


What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now. ~Author Unknown

Passion

We welcome passion, for the mind is briefly let off duty. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Love is often gentle, desire always a rage. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. ~Benjamin Franklin


It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters. ~Roger L'Estrange, Aesop's Fables, 1692


Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason. ~John Wesley


Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002


Chase down your passion like it's the last bus of the night. ~Terri Guillemets


Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Follow your passion, and success will follow you. ~Terri Guillemets


Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~Attributed to Howard Thurman


When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees. ~Abraham Lincoln


The most beautiful make-up of a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy. ~Yves Saint Laurent


The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark. ~Amiel, Journal, 17 December 1856


You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world. ~Sheila Graham


But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter


Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. ~Honoré de Balzac


In music the passions enjoy themselves. ~Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. ~George Santayana


You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. ~Garrison Keillor


Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. ~Aldous Huxley

Parties

After all, what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. ~P.J. O'Rourke


Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!" ~Robin Williams


Cocktail party: A gathering held to enable forty people to talk about themselves at the same time. The man who remains after the liquor is gone is the host. ~Fred Allen


Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both. ~David Brown, quoted in Reader's Digest "Quotable Quotes," April 2004


At every party there are two kinds of people - those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other. ~Ann Landers


[N]o party is any fun unless seasoned with folly. ~Desiderius Erasmus


The dying process begins the minute we are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties. ~Carol Matthau


On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage


I am thankful for the mess to clean after a party because it means I have been surrounded by friends. ~Nancie J. Carmody


Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling. ~George Gordon Byron


Drink, and dance and laugh and lie,
Love the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
~Dorothy Parker


A holiday cocktail party is where some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


No man does right by a woman at a party. ~Harry Golden


What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day. ~Phyllis Diller


She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked. ~Evelyn Waugh


The Life and Soul, the man who will never go home while there is one man, woman or glass of anything not yet drunk. ~Katherine Whitehorn


You know, we've got to do it someday... throw away all the guns and invite all the jokers from the North and the South in here to a cocktail party... last man standing on his feet at the end wins the war. ~Hawkeye, "Pilot Episode," 1972

Optimism

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. ~Robert Brault


Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute. ~Gil Stern


A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note-Book, 1927


The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. ~George F. Will, The Leveling Wind


A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. ~Leonard Louis Levinson


An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. ~Bill Vaughan


An optimist is the human personification of spring. ~Susan J. Bissonette


A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. ~Harry Truman


An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day. ~Irv Kupcinet


Optimist: someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count. ~Kin Hubbard


Optimists are nostalgic about the future. ~Chicago Tribune


Optimism is the foundation of courage. ~Nicholas Murray Butler


An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's the bluebird of happiness. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Of course I look at the glass half full. The only time I would look at it half empty is when I think about how good the first half tasted. ~Drew Deyoung


I am one of those people who just can't help getting a kick out of life - even when it's a kick in the teeth. ~Polly Adler


Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it. ~Douglas Jerrold, "Meeting Troubles Half-Way," 1859


In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip. ~Daniel L. Reardon


It doesn't hurt to be optimistic. You can always cry later. ~Lucimar Santos de Lima


It's still possible to be a cockeyed optimist these days - you just have to be a little more cockeyed. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. ~James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, 1926


Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure. ~Elbert Hubbard


An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition, and his wife in the country. ~Helen Rowland


How do you tell an optimist that he or she has lived a happy life by mistake? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. ~Oscar Wilde


A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is a man who hopes they are. ~Chauncey Mitchell Depew


There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist. ~Mark Twain


The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my left arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me whether I am right-handed or left-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!" ~Lemony Snicket


The basis of optimism is sheer terror. ~Oscar Wilde


How many pessimists end up by desiring the things they fear, in order to prove that they are right? ~Robert Mallett, Apostilles, 1972


an optimist is a guy
that has never had
much experience.
~Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel, 1927


It can be said of optimism that while sometimes mistaken, it is never sadly mistaken. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923


Always borrow money from a pessimist, he doesn't expect to be paid back. ~Author Unknown


After 5000 years of recorded human history, you wonder, What part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn't a pessimist understand? ~Robert Brault,

Opportunities

Jumping at several small opportunities may get us there more quickly than waiting for one big one to come along. ~Hugh Allen


When I look back now over my life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and did not take, my heart is like to break. ~William Hale White


Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards. ~William Arthur Ward


Opportunity is a bird that never perches. ~Claude McDonald


Opportunity is as scarce as oxygen; men fairly breathe it and do not know it. ~Doc Sane


Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. ~Maltbie Babcock


Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity. ~Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach


It is often hard to distinguish between the hard knocks in life and those of opportunity. ~Frederick Phillips


Seize the opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind. ~Bulgarian Proverb


I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one. ~Mark Twain


Seize every opportunity along the way, for how sad it would be if the road you chose became the road not taken. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Ability is of little account without opportunity. ~Napoleon


The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes. ~Benjamin Disraeli


If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door. ~Milton Berle


A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. ~Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625


Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the one you miss. ~Author Unknown


Opportunity is a parade. Even as one chance passes, the next is a fife and drum echoing in the distance. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. ~Harry Truman


Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock. ~Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates," Side Effects, 1980


[I]f one wants to get a boat ride, one must be near the river. ~Anchee Min, Becoming Madame Mao


As you seek new opportunity, keep in mind that the sun does not usually reappear on the horizon where last seen. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


I held a moment in my hand, brilliant as a star, fragile as a flower, a tiny sliver of one hour. I dripped it carelessly, Ah! I didn't know, I held opportunity. ~Hazel Lee


Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. ~Author Unknown


The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity. ~Helen Rowland


All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen. ~Sidney Lumet


When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity. ~John F. Kennedy, address, 12 April 1959


Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them. ~Hugh Miller, Snow on the Wind


Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers. ~Author Unknown


Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. ~Thomas Edison


Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone. ~Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1889


If I were Opportunity, I wouldn't just knock, you'd have to sign. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Nurses

Nurses are angels in comfortable shoes. ~Author Unknown


Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon. ~Dag Hammarskjold


Nurses are the heart of healthcare. ~Donna Wilk Cardillo


Nursing would be a dream job if there were no doctors. ~Gerhard Kocher


Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts. ~Florence Nightingale


Caring is the essence of nursing. ~Jean Watson


Nurses can take the pressure. ~Author Unknown


The trained nurse has become one of the great blessings of humanity, taking a place beside the physician and the priest.... ~William Osler


Nurses dispense comfort, compassion, and caring without even a prescription. ~Val Saintsbury


Bound by paperwork, short on hands, sleep, and energy... nurses are rarely short on caring. ~Sharon Hudacek, "A Daybook for Nurses"


Nurses are I.V. leaguers. ~Author Unknown


When I think about all the patients and their loved ones that I have worked with over the years, I know most of them don't remember me nor I them. But I do know that I gave a little piece of myself to each of them and they to me and those threads make up the beautiful tapestry in my mind that is my career in nursing. ~Donna Wilk Cardillo, A Daybook for Beginning Nurses


After two days in the hospital, I took a turn for the nurse. ~W.C. Fields


When you're a nurse you know that every day you will touch a life or a life will touch yours. ~Author Unknown


Panic plays no part in the training of a nurse. ~Elizabeth Kenny


Nurses are patient people. ~Author Unknown


You might be a nurse if you firmly believe that "too stupid to live" should be a diagnosis. ~Author Unknown


You know you're a nurse if... you triage the laundry when at home: This pile needs immediate attention, the pile can wait, this pile, with a little stain stick will be OK until you get back to it. ~Donna Wilk Cardillo


Whether a person is a male or female, a nurse is a nurse. ~Gary Veale


If Christian scientists had more science and doctors more Christianity, it wouldn't make any difference which you called in - if you had a good nurse. ~Finley Peter Dunne


Nurses - one of the few blessings of being ill. ~Sara Moss-Wolfe


Nursing is not for everyone. It takes a very strong, intelligent, and compassionate person to take on the ills of the world with passion and purpose and work to maintain the health and well-being of the planet. No wonder we're exhausted at the end of the day! ~Donna Wilk Cardillo


If love can't cure it, nurses can. ~Author Unknown


A nurse will always give us hope,
an angel with a stethoscope.
~Carrie Latet


Nurses don't wait until October to celebrate Make a Difference Day - they make a difference every day! ~Author Unknown


Confucius say: "Man who want pretty nurse, must be patient." ~Author Unknown


Nursing care comes in many forms. Sometimes it is the ability to make someone feel physically comfortable by various means. Other times it is the ability to improve the body's ability to achieve or maintain health. But often it is an uncanny yet well honed knack to see beyond the obvious and address, in some way, the deeper needs of the human soul. ~Donna Wilk Cardillo, A Daybook for Beginning Nurses


Always thank your nurse,
Sometimes the only one between you and a hearse.
~Carrie Latet


Nurses are the hospitality of the hospital. ~Carrie Latet


We'd all be worse without a nurse. ~Author Unknown


During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?" Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. "Absolutely," the professor said. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello." I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy. ~Joann C. Jones

Nostalgia

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. ~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860


Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect! ~Owens Lee Pomeroy


If you're yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning. ~Griff Niblack


People seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren't so crazy about the first time around. ~Author Unknown


It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back. ~Bill Vaughn


The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past. ~Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic


[I]t becomes increasingly easy, as you get older, to drown in nostalgia. ~Ted Koppel


Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days. ~Doug Larson


Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers


Nostalgia is a seductive liar. ~George Wildman Ball


It's curious the way we get nostalgic for some hoped-for thing that never happened, as if something that never happened were in the past. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. ~Franklin Pierce Adams


True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. ~Florence King


I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine. ~Lou Reed


Who wants to live with one foot in hell just for the sake of nostalgia? Our time is forever now! ~Alice Childress


Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had.... ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Names

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. ~W.H. Auden


Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive. ~Thomas C. Haliburton


The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. ~Marshall McLuhan


Name is a fence and within it you are nameless. ~Samuli Paronen


A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man. ~Author unknown, quoted by William Hazlitt


Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless. ~Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth


You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic. ~Elias Canetti


Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.' ~David S. Slawson


From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues our honors. ~Proverb


Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.. ~Proverb


What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet


Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names. ~Japanese Proverb


Words have meaning and names have power. ~Author Unknown


If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things. ~Confucius


Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable. ~William Hazlitt


Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior. ~Logan Pearsall Smith


Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. ~Salman Rushdie


I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat. ~Stephen Vincent Benet


And we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
~G.K. Chesterton


People's fates are simplified by their names. ~Elias Canetti


Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. ~Mary Daly


I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts. ~Oliver Goldsmith

Motorcycles

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


Most motorcycle problems are caused by the nut that connects the handlebars to the saddle. ~Author Unknown


Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul. ~Author Unknown


Midnight bugs taste best. ~Author Unknown


You're the guy that'll be sneaking out of your bedroom at three o'clock in the morning to look at your bike. ~Paul Teutul, Sr., American Chopper, "Billy Joel"


It takes more love to share the saddle than it does to share the bed. ~Author Unknown


Bikes don't leak oil, they mark their territory. ~Author Unknown


Keep your bike in good repair: motorcycle boots are not comfortable for walking. ~Author Unknown


Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death. ~Hunter Thompson


The best alarm clock is sunshine on chrome. ~Author Unknown


And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard
Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.
~James Dickey, "Cherrylog Road"


A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. ~Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


What do you call a cyclist who doesn't wear a helmet? An organ donor. ~David Perry


If you don't ride in the rain, you don't ride. ~Author Unknown


Whatever it is, it's better in the wind. ~Author Unknown


Catching a yellow-jacket in your shirt at seventy miles per hour can double your vocabulary. ~Author Unknown


Life is too short for traffic. ~Dan Bellack


Work to ride and ride to work. ~Author Unknown


Burn rubber, not your soul, baby. ~Craig Fernandez and Reggie Bythewood, Biker Boyz


Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you and scorn in the one ahead. ~Mac McCleary


Remember folks, street lights timed for 35 mph are also timed for 70 mph. ~Jim Samuels


Only a biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window. ~Author Unknown


People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. ~Author Unknown


Well-trained reflexes are quicker than luck. ~Author Unknown


Don't argue with an 18-wheeler. ~Author Unknown


Safety doesn't happen by accident. ~Author Unknown


Sometimes the best communication happens when you're on separate bikes. ~Author Unknown


When you're riding lead, don't spit. ~Author Unknown


Maintenance is as much art as it is science. ~Author Unknown


Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy. ~Author Unknown


Never ride faster than your guardian angel can fly. ~Author Unknown


I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol. ~Author Unknown


Two-lane blacktop isn't a highway - it's an attitude. ~Author Unknown


Accidents hurt - safety doesn't. ~Author Unknown


If you ride like there's no tomorrow, there won't be. ~Author Unknown


Keep the paint up, and the rubber down! ~Author Unknown


Everyone crashes. Some get back on. Some don't. Some can't. ~Author Unknown


Life may begin at 30, but it doesn't get real interesting until about 150. ~Author Unknown

Morning

If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late. ~Henny Youngman


Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it. ~Richard Whately


The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. ~Jean Kerr, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, 1957


I'd like mornings better if they started later. ~Author Unknown


For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation? ~Thornton Wilder


Through the blackest night, morning gently tiptoes, feeling its way to dawn. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself. ~Elbert Hubbard


The older generation thought nothing of getting up at five every morning - and the younger generation doesn't think much of it either. ~John J. Welsh


Morning is when the wick is lit. A flame ignited, the day delighted with heat and light, we start the fight for something more than before. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters. ~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis


Sadness flies on the wings of the morning and out of the heart of darkness comes the light. ~Jean Giraudoux


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. ~Monica Baldwin


The sun is but a morning star. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden


There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast. ~Author Unknown


There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock. ~Author Unknown


I can see the orange haze on the horizon as the morning exhales a yawn, and seems to be ready to rise. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


You can only come to the morning through the shadows. ~J.R.R. Tolkien


I have a "carpe diem" mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning the words do not make me want to seize the day. They make me want to slap a dead poet. ~Joanne Sherman


Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first. ~Josh Billings


The plans that I made when horizontal are working out now that I'm vertical. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com


Luxury is an ancient notion. There was once a Chinese mandarin who had himself wakened three times every morning simply for the pleasure of being told it was not yet time to get up. ~Argosy


One key to success is to have lunch at the time of day most people have breakfast. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The day shall not be up so soon as I,
To try the fair adventure of tomorrow.
~William Shakespeare


The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years. ~Thomas Jefferson


I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time. ~Emily Dickinson


To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. ~Henry David Thoreau


Dawn: When men of reason go to bed. ~Ambrose Bierce


No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up. ~Robert Lynd


Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious. ~William Feather


Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up. ~Ellen Goodman


I used to love night best but the older I get the more treasures and hope and joy I find in mornings. ~Terri Guillemets


I don't think jogging is healthy, especially morning jogging. If morning joggers knew how tempting they looked to morning motorists, they would stay home and do sit-ups. ~Rita Rudner

Morality

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist


Morality is a private and costly luxury. ~Henry B. Adams, The Education of Henry Adams


Without doubt half the ethical rules they din into our ears are designed to keep us at work. ~Llewelyn Powys


Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. ~Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1875


The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated


Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach. ~Bertrand Russell


What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command. ~Havelock Ellis


The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy. ~Goethe


The Seven Deadly Sins are a litany of victimless crimes, compiled to distract attention from the bloody felonies of the righteous. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


It is with flowers, as with moral qualities: the bright-coloured are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet-smelling. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered. ~Graham Greene


Why should moral distinction be made between death by the spirochete and death by the streptococcus? ~Martin H. Fischer


What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. ~Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 30 August 1941

Mistakes

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. ~Sophia Loren


It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something. ~Ornette Coleman


I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones. ~John Peel


Never say, "oops." Always say, "Ah, interesting." ~Author Unknown


If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake. ~F. Wikzek


While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. ~Henry C. Link


An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. ~Niels Bohr


A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. ~Alexander Pope, in Swift, Miscellanies


That's not serious; it's just human. ~Jerry Kopke


The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. ~John Powell


The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. ~Edward Phelps


Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster. ~Weston H. Agor


Doing one fool thing after another is not so terrible when you consider the human proclivity to do several fool things at once. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


If a mistake is not a stepping stone, it is a mistake. ~Eli Siegel


One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors; for to dwell upon them is to add to the offense. ~Henry David Thoreau


You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm. ~Colette


Unto those Three Things which the Ancients held impossible, there should be added this Fourth, to find a Book Printed without erratas. ~Alfonso de Cartagena


As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes. ~Mel Brooks


Our blunders mostly come from letting our wishes interpret our duties. ~Author Unknown


When we make mistakes they call it evil. When God makes mistakes they call it Nature! ~Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick


Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player. ~Author Unknown


Mistakes fail in their mission of helping the person who blames them on the other fellow. ~Henry S. Haskins


Error is a hardy plant; it flourishes in every soil. ~Martin F. Tupper


When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm. ~Dan Heist


Making a different mistake every day is not only acceptable, it is the definition of progress. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom. ~Phyllis Theroux, Night Lights


The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes. ~Aubrey Menen


If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out. ~Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds, 1916


A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. ~James Joyce, Ulysses


Just because you make mistakes doesn't mean you are one. ~Author Unknown


Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion. ~Francis Bacon


Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. ~Andrew V. Mason


Errors to be dangerous must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation. ~Sydney Smith


In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season. ~Bill Vaughan


From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own. ~Syrus


It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own. ~Jessamyn West

Mind

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind. ~Eric Hoffer


The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water. ~Sigmund Freud


All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds. ~George Bernard Shaw


If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


The mind is the most capricious of insects - flitting, fluttering. ~Virginia Woolf


No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recesses of another mind. ~Arnold Bennett


It's hard to make up your bed while you're still sleeping in it. Hard to make up your mind for the same reason. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Impressions arriving at the brain make it enter into activity, just as food falling into the stomach excites it to more abundant secretion of gastric juice. ~Pierre Cabanis, translated from French


That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface. ~Robert T. Pirsig


The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Be careful of your thoughts, they may become words at any moment. ~Iara Gassen


A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters. ~Cicero


The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind. ~Katherine Mansfield


Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


[W]ith an unquiet mind, neither exercise, nor diet, nor physick can be of much use. ~Samuel Johnson


Perhaps God gives us a physical body so that every time we change our mind, we won't be someone else. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside....
The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound.
~Emily Dickinson


Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Pain of mind is worse than pain of body. ~Latin Proverb


Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together. ~Charles Caleb Colton


According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else... ~J.K. Rowling, "The Second War Begins," Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2003


Bodies devoid of mind are as statues in the market place. ~Euripides


Sometimes it's harder to attain inner silence than outer silence. The dog stopped barking and the kids have gone to bed, but your mind has a lot to talk about and it knows you can't pretend you're not at home. ~Linda Solegato


The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes


Ever wonder what crime you committed that you are confined to a small enclosure above your sinuses, under permanent skull arrest? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Here in your mind you have complete privacy. Here there's no difference between what is and what could be. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke


Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles. ~Washington Irving, The Sketch Book, 1820


Sometimes I suffer from indigestion of the mind. ~Carrie Latet


Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort. ~Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge


It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. ~Mark Twain


It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion. ~Horace

Memory

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. ~From the television show The Wonder Years


A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. ~Edward de Bono


Every man's memory is his private literature. ~Aldous Huxley


God gave us memories that we might have roses in December. ~J.M. Barrie, Courage, 1922


Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ~Austin O'Malley


Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal


We do not remember days; we remember moments. ~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand


There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. ~Josh Billings


Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us. ~Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"


It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life. ~P.D. James


And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? ~Rainer Maria Rilke


The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. ~Jean de Boufflers


One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson, "Time and Eternity"


I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future. ~David Gerrold


A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose. ~Hortense Calisher, Queenie, 1971


Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. ~Saul Bellow


Memory itself is an internal rumour. ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason


Recalling days of sadness, memories haunt me. Recalling days of happiness, I haunt my memories. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. ~Carol Shields


It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? ~Lord Byron


The past is never dead, it is not even past. ~William Faulkner


The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart. ~Thomas Fuller


Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
~T.S. Eliot


What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. ~Cynthia Ozick


Memory is what tells a man that his wife's birthday was yesterday. ~Mario Rocco


To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.
~Thomas Campbell, Hallowed Ground


In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. ~John Updike


Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember. ~Seneca


The happiest memories are of moments that ended when they should have. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses


I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
~Witter Bynner, "Coins"


The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory. ~Author Unknown


The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind. ~Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There is a Season, 1973


The two offices of memory are collection and distribution. ~Samuel Johnson


Hmmm, how to "can a day?" You know, those days that seem just perfect you want access to them whenever the need arises. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. ~Salvador Dali


Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. ~Michel de Montaigne


The faintest waft is sometimes enough to induce feelings of hunger or anticipation, or to transport you back through time and space to a long-forgotten moment in your childhood. It can overwhelm you in an instant or simply tease you, creeping into your consciousness slowly and evaporating almost the moment it is detected. ~Stephen Lacey, Scent in Your Garden, 1991


She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~Frank Deford


The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. ~From the movie An Affair to Remember


It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact. ~Diane Sawyer


To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward. ~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender

Manners

Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use. ~Emily Post


Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable. ~Barry M. Goldwater and Jack Casserly, Goldwater


Good manners are just a way of showing other people that we have respect for them. ~Bill Kelly


Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts. ~Abel Stevens


Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were. ~Author Unknown


The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones. ~Gabirol (Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol), The Choice of Pearls


Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude. ~Maurice Baring


I don't think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards. ~W. Somerset Maugham


Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup. ~Bennett Cerf


A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. ~Lord Halifax


There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy. ~E.V. Lucas


Visitors should behave in such a way that the host and hostess feel at home. ~J.S. Farynski


Outcomes rarely turn on grand gestures or the art of the deal, but on whether you've sent someone a thank-you note. ~Bernie Brillstein, The Little Stuff Matters Most


Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting. ~French Proverb


Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911


Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength. ~Eric Hoffer


Says the rude child: "No, I won't do it." Says the courteous grown-up: "Yes, I won't do it." ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Good manners can replace morals. It may be years before anyone knows if what you are doing is right. But if what you are doing is nice, it will be immediately evident. ~P.J. O'Rourke


Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. ~Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living: Diaries


Treat people as you would like to be treated. Karma's only a bitch if you are. ~Author Unknown


It's not a slam at you when people are rude - it's a slam at the people they've met before. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you - not because they are nice, but because you are. ~Author Unknown


Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse? ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1960


Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners. ~Author Unknown

Luck

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. ~Wilson Mizner


Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered. ~William Shakespeare


Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit. ~R.E. Shay


Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny. ~Don Sutton


Everything in life is luck. ~Donald Trump


Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident. ~Mark Twain


Luck never gives; it only lends. ~Swedish Proverb


Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Go and wake up your luck. Persian Saying


Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves. ~Larry King


Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent. ~Langston Coleman


It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. ~Frank A. Clark


Luck never made a man wise. ~Seneca, Letters to Lucilius


Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer. ~Author Unknown


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


Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it. ~Author Unknown


Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike? ~Jean Cocteau


The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work. ~Harry Golden

Libraries

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists. ~Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning," American Scholar, 5 June 1972


When I got my library card, that's when my life began. ~Rita Mae Brown


Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul. ~Library at Thebes, inscription over the door


A library is thought in cold storage. ~Herbert Samuel


The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book. You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. ~Lesley Conger


Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest. ~Lady Bird Johnson


As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her. ~Erma Bombeck


We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. ~John Lubbock


A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows. ~Henry Ward Beecher


To those with ears to hear, libraries are really very noisy places. On their shelves we hear the captured voices of the centuries-old conversation that makes up our civilization. ~Timothy Healy


A man's library is a sort of harem. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860


My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table


If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. ~Cicero


Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. ~William Dyer


Here is where people,
One frequently finds,
Lower their voices
And raise their minds.
~Richard Armour, "Library"


A great library contains the diary of the human race. ~George Mercer Dawson


I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air. ~Sholem Asch


The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library. ~Malcolm Forbes


My books are very few, but then the world is before me - a library open to all - from which poverty of purse cannot exclude me - in which the meanest and most paltry volume is sure to furnish something to amuse, if not to instruct and improve. ~Joseph Howe, 1824


I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~Jorge Luis Borges


There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration. ~Andrew Carnegie


A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them. ~Lemony Snicket


Th' first thing to have in a libry is a shelf. Fr'm time to time this can be decorated with lithrachure. But th' shelf is th' main thing. ~Finley Peter Dunne


The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. 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. ~Norman Cousins


A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. ~Jo Godwin


Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Books," Society and Solitude


No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. ~Samuel Johnson


What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. ~Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia


No possession can surpass, or even equal a good library, to the lover of books. Here are treasured up for his daily use and delectation, riches which increase by being consumed, and pleasures that never cloy. ~John Alfred Landford


Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable. Their skills are probably very underestimated and largely underemployed. ~Charles Medawar


For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye. ~Curse Against Book Stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona


A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. ~Shelby Foote


Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.... In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer


There are 70 million books in American libraries, but the one I want to read is always out. ~Tom Masson


Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind. ~Richard Powers


The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul). ~Berlin Royal Library, inscription


Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging: Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger. Law #2: No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging. ~Jesse Shera, 1977


The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Leisure

A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie


We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace. ~Aristotle


Leisure only means a chance to do other jobs that demand attention. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.


It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self. ~Agnes Repplier


The real problem of leisure time is how to keep others from using yours. ~Arthur Lacey


He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate. ~Henry David Thoreau


Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure [has become] entertainment. ~Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987


Leisure: A fancy word for people who don't want to admit they're bored. ~Gene Perret


If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul. ~Logan P. Smith


I would not exchange my leisure hours for all the wealth in the world. ~Comte de Mirabeau


Leisure tends to corrupt, and absolute leisure corrupts absolutely. ~Edgar A. Shoaff


We seldom enjoy leisure we haven't earned. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Leadership

Remember the difference between a boss and a leader; a boss says "Go!" - a leader says "Let's go!" ~E.M. Kelly


A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


A leader leads by example, whether he intends to or not. ~Author Unknown


Leadership is action, not position. ~Donald H. McGannon


You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself. ~Gene Mauch


The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it. ~Elaine Agather


You don't have to hold a position in order to be a leader. ~Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book


Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing. ~Albert Schweitzer


Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. ~Robert Jarvik


You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That's assault, not leadership. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. ~Thomas J. Watson


If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A leader is a dealer in hope. ~Napoleon Bonaparte, attributed


Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders. ~Tom Peters


One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you. ~Dennis A. Peer


A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit. ~John C. Maxwell


A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists.
~Witter Bynner, The Way of Life According to Laotzu


The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way. ~Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart


If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


I am more afraid of an army of one hundred sheep led by a lion than an army of one hundred lions led by a sheep. ~Charles Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand-Périgord


A man is only a leader when a follower stands beside him. ~Mark Brouwer


I suppose that leadership at one time meant muscle; but today it means getting along with people. ~Indira Gandhi


Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present. ~Rudy Giuliani


A leader leads by example not by Force. ~Sun Tzu


A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader. ~Golda Meir


The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. ~Theodore Roosevelt


He led his regiment from behind -
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O.
~W.S. Gilbert


Leadership is based on a spiritual quality; the power to inspire, the power to inspire others to follow. ~Vince Lombardi


We have great managers who haven't spent a day in management school. Do we have great surgeons that haven't spent a day in surgical school? ~Henry Mintzberg


Every leader needs to look back once in a while to make sure he has followers. ~Author Unknown


The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes. ~Tony Blair


Leadership: the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower


When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy. ~Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. ~Anne Bradstreet


A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done. ~Ralph Nader


Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. ~Charles Simic


Management is nothing more than motivating other people. ~Lee Iacocca


There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them. ~Alexandre Ledru-Rollin


I am not a labor leader. I don't want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out. ~Eugene V. Debs


To lead the people, walk behind them. ~Lao-Tzu


Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. ~Eric Hoffer