g’nothi s’auton – Know thy self
— inscription on the wall of the temple at Delphi
You don’t drown by falling in water. You drown by staying there.
— Robert Allen
If at first you don’t succeed, you are running about average.
— M. H. Anderson
Live, live, live! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
— Auntie Mame
Fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae. – Each man the architect of his own fate.
— Appius Caecus, Quoted by Sallust, De Civitate, I. 2
Honey, I can upstage you with out even being on the stage.
— Tallulah Bankhead
Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.
— Mildred Berthel
No man is a failure until he gives up.
— Bishop of London
Corky (Gina Gershon) to Violet (Jennifer Tilly):
Don’t apologize. I can’t stand it when women apologize for wanting sex.
— from the movie Bound
Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.
— James Dean
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
— Margret Drabble
We are not Human Beings having a spiritual experience. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.
— Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
— Thomas Edison
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
— Thomas Edison
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing you’re afraid to do and the death of fear is certain.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
First say to yourself what you would be, then do what you have to do.
— Epictetus
If you build it, they will come.
— From the movie, Field of Dreams
The things you own, end up owning you. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Self-improvement is masturbation. Self-destruction might be the answer. You are not your Khakis.
— Fight Club
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
— Galileo
If you think the world is all wrong, remember that it contains people like you.
— Gandhi
They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.
— Gandhi
To act is easy; to think is hard.
— Goethe
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
— Goethe
Talent develops in tranquility, character in the full current of human life.
— Goethe
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
— Goethe
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.
— Goethe
Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
— Goethe
Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here.
— Goethe
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
— Goethe
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
— Goethe
Hey, world, I’m alive — and these pants are washable!
— Harry, 3rd Rock from the Sun
If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn’t be a human being. You’d be a game show host.
— from the movie “Heathers”
Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.
— Robert Heinlein
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.
— Henrichs
He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.
— George Herbert
Fall seven times, stand up eight .
— Japanese proverb
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining.
— Guy Kawasaki
If you are not a part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
— John F. Kennedy
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
— John F. Kennedy
Perhaps the worst sin in life is knowing right and not doing it.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody . . . it saves so much trouble.
— Rudyard Kipling
I can imagine that an ugly woman who looks in the mirror is convinced that it is her mirror image and not she that is ugly.Thus society sees the mirror image of it’s meanness, and is stupid enough to believe that I am the mean fellow.
— Karl Kraus
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, While loving someone deeply gives you courage
— Lao Tzu
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
— Stephen Leacock
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.
— Abraham Lincoln
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.
— Vince Lombardi (not that I’m fond of the guy, but this is good.)
There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity.
— Gen. Douglas MacArthur
Freefall with the truth; hope we both survive. Deal?
— Ally McBeal
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
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
— Michael Moore
To my little sister on Mother’s Day, in reference to my sexual orientation:
You’re not going to turn out like Steph are you?
[It’s always a delight to hear what people really think of you.]
— My Mother
Whosoever would fight monsters must take care that in the process he does not become one. For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks also into you.
— Neitzche
Passion is not Arrogance. You ever hear that story about Babe Ruth pointing towards the fence before he belted a home run exactly where he said it would? No one knows if it’s true or not; it’s like a myth. But man, you sure want to believe it happened. You want to believe that someone could have that much faith in themselves, in what they do, in what they’re capable of, that they’d guarantee they’re going to do something and then go ahead and do it.
— A Nike Ad
I will choose what enters me, what becomes flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics, no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your calf for fattening, not your cow for milking. You may not use me as your factory. Priests and legislators do not hold shares in my womb or my mind. This is my body. If I give it to you I want it back. My life is a non-negotiable demand.
— Marge Piercy
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
— Plutarch
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
— Alexander Pope
America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
— Ayn Rand
Late to Bed, Early to Rise; Work like Hell, and You’ll be Wise.
— Hyman G. Rickover, Father of the U.S. Nuclear Navy
If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave. The moment he does more than is required, he becomes a free man.
— A.W. Robertson
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you cannot do.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
The thing that women have to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it.
— Roseanne
It is not the civil-social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the outsized, the out-of-bounds, for that by which our wild potency may be unleashed. We crave openly to become our secret selves.
— Salman Rushdie, From The Moor’s Last Sigh
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.
— Carl Sandburg
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
— Carl Sandburg
Growth does not cease being painful at any age.
— May Sarton, from Journal of Solitude
My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life–all of it–flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point, I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and artist, we have to know all we can about one another, and we have to be willing to go naked.
— May Sarton, from Journal of Solitude
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
— Dr. Robert Schuller
This above All,–to thine ownself be true, And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
— Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene III
This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.
— Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
— Henry David Thoreau
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
— Mark Twain
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people can always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
— Mark Twain
Lightning flashes across the sky, east to west, do or die. Like a thief in the night, see the world by candlelight. from Seconds
— U2
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best.
— Henry Van Dyke
Fortune favours the bold.
— Virgil, Aeneid
Progress always involves risk. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
— Frederick B. Wilcox
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
— Oscar Wilde
Success is a matter of luck. Ask any failure.
— Earl Wilson
I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
— Woodrow Wilson