About Idea

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
Anatole France (1844 - 1924)
Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.
Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)
There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.
Emile Chartier
An idea is salvation by imagination.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869 - 1959)
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)
I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.
Hortense Calisher
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
Howard Aiken (1900 - 1973)
Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
Hyman Rickover (1900 - 1986)
So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible, though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.
J. B. S. Haldane (1892 - 1964)
Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.
Jim Hightower, The New York Times, March 9, 1986
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
John Cage (1912 - 1992)
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)
Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
Ken Hakuta
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894)
The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
P. B. Medawar (1915 - )
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)
The best ideas are common property.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), Epistles
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Sir Barnett Cocks (1907 - 1989)
No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
Sir Frederick G. Banting (1891 - 1941)
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
Tom Stoppard (1937 - )
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), 'Histoire d'un crime,' 1852
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Walter Bagehot (1826 - 1877)
The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas (1898 - 1980)

About Humor

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
A. Whitney Brown
Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Humor is everywhere, in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.
Bill Nye, Interview with Wired.com, April 2005
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.
Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977), in My Autobiography (1964)
Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
Colette (1873 - 1954), Chance Acquaintances, 1952
Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?
Dick Clark
A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
E. B. White (1899 - 1985), Some Remarks on Humor, introduction
Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
Edward De Bono
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Horace Walpole (1717 - 1797)
If there's one thing I know it's God does love a good joke.
Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, 05-01-04
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
James Thurber (1894 - 1961)
The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
James Thurber (1894 - 1961), in Edward R. Murrow television interview
Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006)
One doesn't have a sense of humor. It has you.
Larry Gelbart
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford (1895 - 1990)
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 (1835 - 1910)
Humor is a rubber sword - it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.
Mary Hirsch
Humor is just another defense against the universe.
Mel Brooks (1926 - )
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks (1926 - )
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004)
Comedy is nothing more than tragedy deferred.
Pico Iyer, Time
Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Letters and Social Aims: The Comic, 1876
Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.
Robert Benchley (1889 - 1945)
Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.
Salma Hayek
Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)

About Hope

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC), Agamemnon
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), The Rebel (1951)
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--'Wait and hope'.
Alexandre Dumas (1802 - 1870), The Count of Monte Cristo
Hope doesn't come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. It's simply a choice to take action.
Anna Lappe, O Magazine, June 2003
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.
Anne Lamott
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
He that lives upon hope will die fasting.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
While there's life, there's hope.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), Ad Atticum
Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul.And sings the tuneWithout the words,and never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
Epicurus (341 BC - 270 BC)
He who has never hoped can never despair.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901) act 4
History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.
George W. Bush (1946 - )
Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Hope is only the love of life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Young people have an almost biological destiny to be hopeful.
Marshall Ganz, quoted by Sara Rimer in New York Times
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,Adorns and cheers our way;And still, as darker grows the night,Emits a brighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774)
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
Quida
It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.
Robert H. Goddard (1882 - 1945)
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894)
Hope is necessary in every condition.
Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Stephen Ambrose (1936 - 2002), in Fast Company
Cease, every joy, to glimmer on my mind,But leave---oh! leave the light of Hope behind.
Thomas Campbell (1777 - 1844)
Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
Never lose hope.
Unknown, Polish Slogan
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings; Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "King Richard III", Act 5 scene 2
I can endure my own despair,but not another's hope.
William Walsh

About Health

As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.
Adelle Davis
Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.
Albert Schweitzer (1875 - 1965)
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Albert Schweitzer (1875 - 1965)
Health is not valued till sickness comes.
Dr. Thomas Fuller (1654 - 1734), Gnomologia, 1732
Be not slow to visit the sick.
Ecclesiastes
Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)
It is amazing how much crisper the general experience of life becomes when your body is given a chance to develop a little strength.
Frank Duff, A Coder in Courierland, 03-20-05
What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
George Dennison Prentice
Health is not simply the absence of sickness.
Hannah Green
A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.
Hippocrates (460 BC - 377 BC), Regimen in Health
Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of, a blessing money can't buy.
Izaak Walton (1593 - 1683)
You can either hold yourself up to the unrealistic standards of others, or ignore them and concentrate on being happy with yourself as you are.
J. Jacques, Questionable Content webcomic, #352, 05-04-05
It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
Jackie Mason (1934 - )
If you trust Google more than your doctor then maybe it's time to switch doctors.
Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 08-21-06
Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you've met your New Year's resolution.
Jay Leno (1950 - )
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Getting my lifelong weight struggle under control has come from a process of treating myself as well as I treat others in every way.
Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, August 2004
Pain (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: "We would be more alive if we did more of this," and, "Life would be more lovely if we did less of that." Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.
Peter McWilliams, Life 101
The more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones.
Peter McWilliams, Life 101
Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp
One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick.
Rabbi Harold Kushner
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Redd Foxx (1922 - 1991)
Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
Robert Orben
Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.
Robin Norwood
A Hospital is no place to be sick.
Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)
Beauty isn't something on the outside. It's your insides that count! You gotta eat green stuff to make sure you're pretty on the inside.
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005
I don't want to live in a world where I have to eat sugar-free sugar cookies.
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005
Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Health is worth more than learning.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), letter to his cousin John Garland Jefferson, June 11, 1790
Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?
Tom Hanks (1956 - ), Esquire, June 2006

About Happiness

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
The secret of happiness is to make others believe they are the cause of it.
Al Batt, in National Enquirer
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Albert Schweitzer (1875 - 1965)
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole France (1844 - 1924)
The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755 - 1826), Physiologie du Gout, 1825
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.
Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982)
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
All I can say about life is, Oh God, enjoy it!
Bob Newhart (1929 - )
The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
C. P. Snow (1905 - 1980)
Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.
Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
This is the best kind of voyeurism, hearing joy from your neighbors.
Chuck Sigars, The World According to Chuck weblog, October 14, 2003
Sometimes it's hard to avoid the happiness of others.
David Assael, Northern Exposure, Our Tribe, 1992
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
Doris Lessing
Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
Eddie Cantor (1892 - 1964)
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Man and Superman" (1903), act I
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns (1896 - 1996)
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Journal, January 21, 1838
If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us least live so as to deserve it.
Immanuel Hermann Fichte
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
J. D. Salinger (1919 - )
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
Jean Houston
Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
John Berry, Flight of White Crows
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719), The Spectator, March 17, 1911
Laughing is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.
Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)

About God

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.
Agathon (448 BC - 400 BC), from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
At any rate, I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), In a letter to Max Born, 1926
Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
O ye of little faith, who believe that somehow the birth of Christ is dependent upon acknowledgment in a circular from OfficeMax!
Anna Quindlen (1953 - ), Newsweek, 01-02-06
Or what about the statue in California currently said to be crying bloody tears? Why worry about the alleged weeping of a plaster effigy when so many actual human beings have reason to cry?
Anna Quindlen (1953 - ), Newsweek, 01-02-06
God is not dead but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project.
Anonymous, Graffito
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.
Brenda Ueland
When you want something really bad and you close your eyes and wish for it-- God's the guy who ignores you.
Caspian Tredwell-Owen, and Alex Kurtzman, The Island, 2005
All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Chuck Palahniuk (1962 - ), Invisible Monsters, 1999
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
Slow but sure moves the might of the gods.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC), The Bacchae, circa 407 B.C.
Everyone ought to worship God according to his own inclinations, and not to be constrained by force.
Flavius Josephus (37 AD - 100 AD), Life
Pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended upon man.
Francis Cardinal Spellman (1889 - 1967)
I could prove God statistically.
George Gallup (1901 - 1984)
The glorious gifts of the gods are not to be cast aside.
Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad
The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city, observing the wrongdoing and the righteousness of men.
Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Odyssey
Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen.
Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Iliad
If there's one thing I know it's God does love a good joke.
Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, 05-01-04
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
Indian Proverb
What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?
Irv Kupcinet
God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest.
J. G. Holland
I want to believe in intelligent design, and hence I am suspicious of anything that seems to confirm my desire to believe.
James Lileks, The Bleat web log, September 15, 2003
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Jewish Proverb
God must become an activity in our consciousness.
Joel S. Goldsmith
We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Or perhaps she's just softening me up: she's a Baptist, she'd like me to find Jesus, or vice versa, before it's too late. That kind of thing doesn't run in her family: her mother Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble, naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers, but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it didn't pay to get too mixed up with him.
Margaret Atwood (1939 - ), The Blind Assassin
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Mary Daly
Sometimes it seems like God is difficult to find and impossibly far away. We get so caught up in our small daily duties and irritations that they become the only things that we can focus on. What we forget is that God's love and beauty are all around us, every day, if only we would take the time to look up and see them.
Matthias, Correction Weblog, 11-01-03
No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.
Minor White

About Friendship

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ali ibn-Abi-Talib (602 AD - 661 AD), A Hundred Sayings
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Eudemian Ethics
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Nichomachean Ethics
A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling.
Arthur Brisbane, "The Book of Today"
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), On Friendship, 44 B.C.
The shifts of Fortune test the reliability of friends.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), De Amicitia
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
Colette (1873 - 1954), The Pure and the Impure, 1932
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC), The Confucian Analects
Do not protect yourself by a fence, but rather by your friends.
Czech Proverb
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
Dame Edna Everage (1934 - )
Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)
Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his.
Franklin P. Jones, Saturday Evening Post, November 29, 1953
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 growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
George Washington (1732 - 1799)
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986)
All people want is someone to listen.
Hugh Elliott, Standing Room Only weblog, May 8, 2003
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Northanger Abbey
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese Proverb
Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances.
Jay Leno (1950 - )
In prosperity our friends know us; in adversity we know our friends.
John Churton Collins
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719), The Spectator, March 17, 1911
It isn't kind to cultivate a friendship just so one will have an audience.
Lawana Blackwell, The Courtship of the Vicar's Daughter, 1998
A good friend of my son's is a son to me.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos, 1986
Adversity does teach who your real friends are.
Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity, 2002
Never refuse any advance of friendship, for if nine out of ten bring you nothing, one alone may repay you.
Madame de Tencin
It’s the friends you can call up at four a.m. that matter.
Marlene Dietrich (1901 - 1992)
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894), The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

About Fear

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Unpopular Essays (1950), "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
Dorothy Bernard
Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person.
Dr. David M. Burns
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", 1756
One need not be a chamber to be haunted;One need not be a house;The brain has corridors surpassingMaterial place.
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983), The Passionate State of Mind, 1954
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
In life we don’t get what we want, we get in life what we are. If we want more we have to be able to be more, in order to be more you have to face rejection.
Farrah Gray
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Ferdinand Foch (1851 - 1929)
Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
Frances Moore Lappe, O Magazine, May 2004
I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.
Frances Moore Lappe, O Magazine, May 2004
Let the fear of danger be a spur to prevent it; he that fears not, gives advantage to the danger.
Francis Quarles (1592 - 1644)
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
George Carlin (1937 - )
Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.
George Sewell
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
Jean Paul Richter (1763 - 1825)
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach, Aphorisms, 1905
Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.
Marilyn Ferguson
Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.
Michael Pritchard
To use fear as the friend it is, we must retrain and reprogram ourselves...We must persistently and convincingly tell ourselves that the fear is here--with its gift of energy and heightened awareness--so we can do our best and learn the most in the new situation.
Peter McWilliams, Life 101
The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, 1988
At first cock-crow the ghosts must goBack to their quiet graves below.
Theodosia Garrison

About Failure

If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.
Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle
It is possible to fail in many ways...while to succeed is possible only in one way.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Nichomachean Ethics
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
Beverly Sills (1929 - )
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby (1937 - )
If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
Bill Lyon
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
Act as if it were impossible to fail.
Dorothea Brande
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal (1925 - )
Men are born to succeed, not fail.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
Herbert Bayard Swope (1882 - 1958)
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
John Keats (1795 - 1821)
If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)
You always pass failure on the way to success.
Mickey Rooney (1920 - )
Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal.
Mike Ditka (1939 - )
If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp
We all have a few failures under our belt. It's what makes us ready for the successes.
Randy K. Milholland, Midnight Macabre, 10-18-05
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
Robert Browning (1812 - 1889)
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
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan (1908 - 1981)

About Education

You don't need fancy highbrow traditions or money to really learn. You just need people with the desire to better themselves.
Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, Accepted, 2006
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Alec Bourne
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
Anatole France (1844 - 1924)
Education is the best provision for old age.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B. F. Skinner (1904 - 1990), New Scientist, May 21, 1964
The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people.
Claiborne Pell (1918 - )
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
Clive James
The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
Diogenes Laertius
Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him.
Dr. Thomas Fuller (1654 - 1734), Gnomologia, 1732
Only the educated are free.
Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD), Discourses
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar (1899 - 1995)
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962), English Social History (1942)
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
Gail Godwin
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), Outline of History (1920)
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
Education has for its object the formation of character.
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
Bachelor's degrees make pretty good placemats if you get 'em laminated.
J. Jacques, Questionable Content, 01-04-07
That's what college is for - getting as many bad decisions as possible out of the way before you're forced into the real world. I keep a checklist of 'em on the wall in my room.
J. Jacques, Questionable Content, 01-04-07
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
James A. Garfield (1831 - 1881), July 12, 1880
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
John Ciardi (1916 - 1986)
She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life.
John Mason Brown (1900 - 1969)
Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or because they didn't.
L. L. Henderson
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990), in Forbes Magazine
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

About Enemies

The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
Aesop (620 BC - 560 BC), The Eagle and the Arrow
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ali ibn-Abi-Talib (602 AD - 661 AD), A Hundred Sayings
Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment.
Andre Maurois (1885 - 1967)
Observe your enemies, for they first find out your faults.
Antisthenes (445 BC - 365 BC)
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Baltasar Gracian
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
Bette Davis (1908 - 1989), The Lonely Life, 1962
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
He hasn't an enemy in the world - but all his friends hate him.
Eddie Cantor (1892 - 1964)
Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer (1902 - 1983)
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)
Rejoice not at thine enemy's fall - but don't rush to pick him up either.
Jewish Proverb
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
Joseph Heller (1923 - 1999), Catch 22
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), in Christian Science
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Moshe Dayan (1915 - 1981)
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
We can learn even from our enemies.
Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD), Metamorphoses
Use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.
Persian Proverb
Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy.
Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
Reveal not every secret you have to a friend, for how can you tell but that friend may hereafter become an enemy. And bring not all mischief you are able to upon an enemy, for he may one day become your friend.
Saadi (1184 - 1291)
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
Sally Kempton
Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Thomas Jones (1892 - 1969)
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
William Blake (1757 - 1827)
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)

About Desire

The wise man will love; all others will desire.
Afranius
One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life.
Alexander A. Bogomoletz
Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfilment of animal desires.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922)
Dwell not upon thy weariness, thy strength shall be according to the measure of thy desire.
Arab Proverb
Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Politics
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), In Stobaeus, Florilegium
It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Politics
How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!
Belva Plain
If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it.
Brendan Francis
In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honour, command, power, and glory.
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
Let your desires be ruled by reason.(Appetitus Rationi Pareat)
Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)
He who desires is always poor.
Claudianus
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Man and Superman" (1903), act 4
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied.
Henry George (1839 - 1897)
Manifest plainness,Embrace simplicity,Reduce selfishness,Have few desires.
Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.There is no greater guilt than discontentment.And there is no greater disaster than greed.
Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996
One must desire something to be alive.
Margaret Deland, O Magazine, September 2002
A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Following the Equator
When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.
Nicole Kidman, in The Scotsman
We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.
Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims
Desire creates the power.
Raymond Holliwell
Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
Rebecca West (1892 - 1983)
What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.
Stanley Kunitz, O Magazine, September 2003
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
William Blake (1757 - 1827), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790-1793)
Every man has business and desire, Such as it is.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Hamlet", Act 1 scene 5

About Dream

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC), Agamemnon
To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
Anatole France (1844 - 1924)
Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don't.
Brett Butler, 'Knee Deep in Paradise'
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick, O Magazine, September 2002
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849), "Eleonora"
The wisest men follow their own direction.
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC)
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller (1759 - 1805)
You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Back to Methuselah" (1921), part 1, act 1
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
Germaine Greer, O Magazine, September 2002
They say dreams are the windows of the soul--take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.
Henry Bromel, Northern Exposure, The Big Kiss, 1991
Dreams surely are difficult, confusing, and not everything in them is brought to pass for mankind. For fleeting dreams have two gates: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those which pass through the one of sawn ivory are deceptive, bringing tidings which come to nought, but those which issue from the one of polished horn bring true results when a mortal sees them.
Homer (800 BC - 700 BC), The Odyssey
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), speech in Dublin, Ireland, June 28, 1963
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike (1932 - )
I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me until the last small twig has grown.
Kathe Kollwitz, O Magazine, September 2002
It has never been my object to record my dreams, just to realize them.
Man Ray, O Magazine, September 2002
One must desire something to be alive.
Margaret Deland, O Magazine, September 2002
Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Speech at Civil Rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963
I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, September 2002
The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance - and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.
Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine, September 2002
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
It hurts to find out that what you wanted doesn't match what you dreamed it would be.
Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 09-07-04
Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up the pillow was gone.
Tommy Cooper
There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood tomorrow.
Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Miserables, 1862
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
William Dement, in Newsweek, 1959
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Hamlet", Act 1 scene 5
The things that one most wants to do are the things that are probably most worth doing.
Winifred Holtby, O Magazine, September 2002
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
Woody Allen (1935 - ), "Without Feathers"

About Business

Talk of nothing but business, and dispatch that business quickly.
Aldus Manutius (1449 - 1515), Placard on the door of the Aldine Press
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
Drive thy business or it will drive thee.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
The chief business of the American people is business.
Calvin Coolidge (1872 - 1933), Speech in Washington, Jan. 17, 1925
There's no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.
David Letterman (1947 - )
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.
David M. Ogilvy
Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
David Rockefeller (1915 - )
Here’s my theory about meetings and life; the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes. One of the most common creativity-faking tactics is when someone puts their hands in prayer position and conceals their mouth while they nod at you and say, 'Mmmmmm. Interesting.' If pressed, they’ll add, 'I’ll have to get back to you on that.' Then they don’t say anything else.
Douglas Coupland
'Whom are you?' he asked, for he had attended business college.
George Ade (1866 - 1944), "The Steel Box", 1898
Good design can't fix broken business models.
Jeffrey Veen, Designing the Friendly Skies, 06-21-06
I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
John Cleese (1939 - )
You never really hear the truth from your subordinates until after 10 in the evening.
Jurgen Schrempp, Former CEO of DaimlerChrysler
A dinner lubricates business.
Lord William Stowell
To succeed as a team is to hold all of the members accountable for their expertise.
Mitchell Caplan, CEO, E*Trade Group Inc.
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900), Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892
Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards--and living up to them--is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.
Seth Godin, Seth Godin's Blog, 07-28-06
I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.
Sydney Biddle Barrows, in Marian Christy, ''Mayflower Madam' Tells All,' Boston Globe, 1986
Designing your product for monetization first, and people second will probably leave you with neither.
Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow, 07-12-06
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929)
In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
Warren Buffett (1930 - )