Quotations: Inspirational These quotations offer inspiring words of advice. Hopefully the wisdom they contain will brighten your day. Find more inspirational quotes at WellofWisdom.com. Quotations are sorted* by: Date Added Quotations can be sorted by: Date Added Star Rating Author's Name ***** "The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes - and we must." -Jimmy Carter ***** "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy." -Albert Einstein ***** "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." -Albert Einstein ***** "To a great experience one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. It is not enough to have opportunity; it is essential to feel it." -Walter Bagehot ***** "The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise." -Robert Frost ***** "There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "As soon as we attract enough attention in the world to play a part in it, we are set rolling like a ball which will never again be at rest." -Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne ***** "A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it." -Sir Richard Steele ***** "Champions keep playing until they get it right." -Billie Jean King ***** "Sometimes you just have to take the leap, and build your wings on the way down." -Kobi Yamada ***** "If you find out how to make money at something you love doing, then you'll never have to work another day in your life." -??? ***** "Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow." -Maria Mitchell ***** "Dont cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -??? ***** "This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind . . . let it be something good." -??? ***** "What did you do today? Is anybody happier because you passed this way? Does anyone remember that you spoke today? The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through: Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word of you? Can you say tonight in parting with the day that's slipping fast, That you helped a single person of the many that you passed? Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said? Does the one whose hopes were fading now with courage look ahead? Did you waste the day or use it? Was it well or sorely spent? Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent? As you close you eyes in slumber, do you think that you can say: You have earned one more tomorrow by what you did today?" -??? ***** "Does thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of." -Benjamin Franklin Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It is a great blessing to meet struggle and opposition with whatever fire there is in us that is kindled by these. Life does not mean merely following the softest road, the path of least resistance; it is doing something vital. Hardships and difficulties bring out the best in us and make us strong." -Swami Paramananda ***** "Just remember, the only people not making mistakes are those who aren't doing anything." -Tim W. Welborn ***** "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." -John Updike ***** "Goals... There's no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There's no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There's no telling what will happen when you act upon them." -Jim Rohn ***** "If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us." -Jim Rohn ***** "We all need lots of powerful long range goals to help us past the short term obstacles." -Jim Rohn ***** "Some dream of doing great things, while others stay awake and get on with it." -??? ***** "It's not who you are that holds you back. It's who you think you're not that does." -??? ***** "All things are difficult before they are easy." -Thomas Fulle ***** "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot ***** "Make the most of yourself...for that is all there is of you." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "And will you succeed? You will indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)" -Dr. Seuss ***** "The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it." -Epicurus ***** "Keep your face to the sunshine, and you cannot see the shadows." -Helen Keller ***** "Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person we become." -Jim Rohn Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Failure is success if we learn from it." -Malcolm S. Forbes ***** "Whoever is happy will make others happy too." -??? ***** "True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall." -Thomas Carlyle ***** "Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and just be my friend." -Albert Camus ***** "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." -Eleanor Roosevelt ***** "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -Helen Keller ***** "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!" -Søren Kierkegaard ***** "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "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 opened for us." -Helen Keller ***** "All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers." -Orison Swett Marden ***** "Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." -Henry Miller ***** "The important thing to recognize is that it takes a team, and the team ought to get credit for the wins and the losses. Successes have many fathers, failures have none." -Philip Caldwell ***** "Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves." -Sir James Barrie ***** "Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have." -Louis E. Boone ***** "For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive." -David H. Lawrence ***** "Do not think of your faults, still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes." -John Ruskin Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for." -Louis L'Amour ***** "I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today." -Henry Ford ***** "Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first base." -Frederick Wilcox ***** "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once." -William Shakespeare ***** "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." -Ambrose Redmoon ***** "Don't be afraid to take a big step when one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small steps." -David Lloyd George ***** "The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still. Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing -- where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do." -Phillips Brooks ***** "I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him." -Abraham Lincoln ***** "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" -Henry James ***** "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time." -James Taylor ***** "The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible." -??? ***** "Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Celebrate it every day." -??? ***** "There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure." -George Sand ***** "The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people who have become wealthy have become so thanks to work they found profoundly absorbing. The long term study of people who eventually became wealthy clearly reveals that their 'luck' arose from accidental dedication they had to an arena they enjoyed." -Srully Blotnick ***** "You only live once -- but if you work it right, once is enough." -Joe E. Lewis Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had." -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ***** "Work like you don't need money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." -??? ***** "Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best." -Henry Van Dyke ***** "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." -Mark Twain ***** "When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." -Franklin D. Roosevelt ***** "My country is the world and my religion is to do good." -Thomas Paine ***** "The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts life." -William James ***** "To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one." -Jack Kornfield ***** "I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them." -Benedict Spinoza ***** "Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do." -Thomas Aquinas ***** "Virtue is its own reward." -Marcus Tullius Cicero ***** "The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make." -Aristotle ***** "The unexamined life is not worth living." -Socrates ***** "To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for." -Geoffrey Warnock ***** "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits." -Ludwig Wittgenstein ***** "The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress." -Bertrand Russell Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." -Dr. Alfred D'Souza ***** "Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind." -Louis Pasteur ***** "Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." -Dale Carnegie ***** "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." -George Washington ***** "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." -Helen Keller ***** "The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it." -Epicurus ***** "Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant." -Horace ***** "To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top." -??? ***** "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." -??? ***** "It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts." -Millard Fuller ***** "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be." -Douglas Adams ***** "Success is that old ABC -- ability, breaks, and courage." -Charles Luckman ***** "The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going." -??? ***** "Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well." -Josh Billings ***** "The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." -William James ***** "Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps." -David Lloyd George Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen." -Ernest Hemingway ***** "I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see." -John Burrough ***** "Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was." -Richard L. Evans ***** "If you can't return a favor, pass it on." -Louise Brown ***** "You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses." -Ziggy ***** "In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action." -Aristotle ***** "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." -Abraham Lincoln ***** "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.... Make big plans... aim high in hope and work." -Daniel H. Burnham ***** "The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers." -Marin Luther King, Jr. ***** "Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." -Leonardo DaVinci ***** "We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless." -James W. Fulbright ***** "If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing." -Saint Augustine ***** "Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing." -Isaac Bashevis Singer ***** "Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." -Richard M. Nixon ***** "The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain." -Richard M. Nixon ***** "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort." -John Ruskin Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity." -The Kabbalah ***** "The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life." -Henry Ford ***** "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." -William Shakespeare ***** "The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been." -Henry Kissinger ***** "Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions." -Harold Geneen ***** "I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty." -John D. Rockefeller ***** "The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future." -Alfred North Whitehead ***** "Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height." -Buddha ***** "We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves." -Buddha ***** "If we deny love that is given to us, if we refuse to give love because we fear pain or loss, then our lives will be empty, our loss greater." -??? ***** "When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." -Henri Nouwen ***** "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." -Herman Cain ***** "There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. Similarly, there is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this." -Miyamoto Musashi ***** "The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm." -Fred Dehner ***** "You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment." -Alvin Toffler ***** "Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation." -Mahatma Gandhi Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth." -Mahatma Gandhi ***** "The future belongs to those who prepare for it today." -Malcolm X ***** "If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives." -Robert South ***** "Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over." -F. Scott Fitzgerald ***** "Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies." -Philip Dormer Chesterfield ***** "Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind." -Samuel Johnson ***** "The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places." -Ernest Hemingway ***** "The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur." -Vince Lombardi ***** "Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon." -Oscar Wilde ***** "You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life. This is not an easy struggle. Indeed, it may be the most difficult task in the world, for opening the door to your own life is, in the end, more difficult than opening the doors to the mysteries of the universe." -Daisaku Ikeda ***** "A fellow can't keep people from having a bad opinion of him, but he can keep them from being right about it." -??? ***** "Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few." -Pythagoras ***** "To be good, we must do good; and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power." -Tryon Edwards ***** "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form." -Albert Einstein ***** "What is outside yourself does not convey much worth; Clothes do not make the man, the saddle not the horse." -Angelius Silesius Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony." -Ruth Bernhard ***** "One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape." -Friedrich Nietzsche ***** "People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." -Thomas Szasz ***** "A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ***** "He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world." -E. R. Eddison ***** "Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life." -Bertrand Russell ***** "Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, buy you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way." -David Whyte ***** "Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." -Vilfredo Pareto ***** "The hidden harmony is better than the obvious." -Heraclitus ***** "When you come right down to it, all you have is your self. Your self is a sun with a thousand rays in your belly. The rest is nothing." -Pablo Picasso ***** "One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." -Andre Gide ***** "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." -Agnes de Mille ***** "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." -Ludwig Wittgenstein ***** "If you stop searching, you stop living, because then you're dwelling in the past. If you're not reaching forward to any growth or future, you might as well be dead." -Wynn Bullock ***** "The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself." -John Fowles ***** "There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be." -John Fowles Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts." -Ray Bradbury ***** "The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us." -Loren Eiseley ***** "o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." -F. Scott Fitzgerald ***** "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." -Thomas Paine ***** "Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none." -Shakespeare ***** "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." -Heraclitus ***** "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks." -Will Durant ***** "That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had." -Robert Louis Stevenson ***** "Know people for who they are rather than for what they are." -Anthony J. D'Angelo ***** "Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "I share no man's opinions; I have my own." -Ivan Turgenev ***** "The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." -Victor Hugo ***** "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." -e. e. cummings ***** "Better contraceptives will control population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior." -B. F. Skinner ***** "That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong." -William J.H. Boetcker ***** "One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this." -The Impossible Dream Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." -Robert Frost ***** "You can choose a ready guide In some celestial voice If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill I will choose a path that's clear I will chose free will." -RUSH ***** "If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse....I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist." -Ayn Rand ***** "This above all: to thine own self be true." -William Shakespeare, Hamlet ***** "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." -Albert Einstein ***** "Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." -Mark Twain ***** "Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)" -Mark Twain ***** "What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." -William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways ***** "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." -Frank Herbert ***** "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place." -Mark Twain ***** "Every man is the architect of his own fortune." -Appius Claudius ***** "It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." -Dolores Ibarruri ***** "Doubt sees the obstacles faith sees the way. Doubt sees the darkest night Faith sees the day. Doubt dreads to take a step Faith soars on high. Doubt questions 'who believes?' Faith answers, 'I.'" -??? ***** "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia." -Charles Schultz ***** "If people talk negatively about you, live so that no one will believe them." -??? ***** "If you treat a person as he is, he will remain as he is. If you treat him for what he could be, he will become what he could be." -??? Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many." -??? ***** "Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which, once you've got it, you might be smart enough to see it is what you would have wanted had you known." -Garrison Keillor ***** "Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." -William Faulkner ***** "What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?" -Dr. Robert Schuller ***** "One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words." -Goethe ***** "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." -James Baldwin ***** "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe ***** "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings 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 Einstein ***** "If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut." -Albert Einstein Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of angels." -Benjamin Disraeli ***** "I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Toombstone, Arizona. It says: "Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest." I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have." -Harry Truman ***** "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." -Theodore Roosevelt ***** "If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well." -Martin Luther King, Jr ***** "Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny." -??? ***** "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -Henry David Thoreau ***** "One ship drives east and the other drives west With the selfsame winds that blow. 'Tis the set of the sails and not the gales Which tells us the way to go." -Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Winds of Fate ***** "A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." -John A. Shedd ***** "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward ***** "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know." -W. H. Auden ***** "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt Click Here to Visit our Sponsor 220 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page.