Favorite quotes

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

 

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out. -Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)

 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? -George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

 

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves. -Soren Kierkegaard, philosopher (1813-1855)

 

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

 

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

 

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses. -Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)

 

You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power -- he's free again. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918-2008)

 

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. -Proverb

 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

 

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. -George Washington Carver, scientist (1864-1943)

 

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

 

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. -Joseph Conrad, novelist (1857-1924)

 

Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot. A man can find it, he can live it, he can be filled and sustained by it, but he cannot utter or teach it.
--Hermann Hesse,
German-Swiss writer and poet

 

When a man finds no peace within himself, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
--Francois de La Rochefoucauld,
French writer

 

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.
--Harrison Salisbury,
American journalist

 

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot. -Charlie Chaplin, actor, director, and composer (1889-1977)

 

"Every Adversity carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit."

 

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

 

It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. -Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)