Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.

~ Goran Persson 

There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to - if there are no doors or windows - he walks through a wall. 

~ Bernard Malamud, novelist and short-story writer (1914-1986) 

Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. 

~ Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983) 

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. 

~ Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778) 

If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.

~ Bob Hope 

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

~ Erma Bombeck

Love truth, but pardon error. 

~ Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778) 

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. 

~ Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE) 

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. 

~ Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978) 

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! 

~ Gustave Flaubert, novelist (1821-1880)

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck. 

~ Hector Berlioz, composer (1803-1869) 

Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily. 

~ Chinese proverb 

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. 

~ Grace Hopper, computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral (1906-1992) 

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. 

~ Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (1918-2013) 

A library is thought in cold storage. 

~ Herbert Samuel, politician and diplomat (1870-1963) 

Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. 

~ Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964) 

If you get down and quarell everyday, you're saying prayers to the devil, I say.

~ Bob Marley 

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones. 
~ Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862) 

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. 

~ Madeleine L'Engle, writer (1918-2007) 

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. 

~ William Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827) 

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. 

~ Kahlil Gibran, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use. 

~ Charles Schulz, cartoonist (1922-2000) 

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

~ Andrew Carnegie, industrialist (1835-1919) 

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt 

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. 

~ John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963) 

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in. 

~ Alan Alda, actor and director (b. 1936) 

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? 

~ Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)  

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. 

~ Marianne Moore, poet (1887-1972) 

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. 

~ Claude Monet, painter (1840-1926)

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. 

~ Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894) 

Patience is also a form of action. 

~ Auguste Rodin, sculptor (1840-1917)

How elegantly you manage disappointment will determine how quickly you'll experience success
~ Robin Sharma

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. 

~ Margaret Mitchell, novelist (1900-1949) 

Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research. 

~ Marie Curie, scientist, Nobel laureate (1867-1934) 

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. 

~ Abraham Lincoln, 16th US President (1809-1865) 

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world. 

~ Will Durant, historian (1885-1981) 

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

~ Maya Angelou 

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all. 

~ Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (1475-1564) 

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

~ Chanakya 

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation. 

~ Ezra Pound, poet (1885-1972) 

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. 
~ Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784) 

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

~ Bill Cosby 

It is kindness immediately to refuse what you intend to deny. 

~ Publilius Syrus, writer (c. 1st century BCE) 

The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree and through that bad companionship must perish with it. 

~ Leonardo da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519) 

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. 

~ Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626) 

Every saint has a past and every sinner a future. 

~ Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900) 

If the rich could hire someone else to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living. 

~ Jewish proverb 

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. 

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, US general and 34th president (1890-1969) 

Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research. 

~ Marie Curie, scientist, Nobel laureate (1867-1934) 

A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. 

~ R.K. Narayan, writer (1906-2001) 

Imagine there's no countries,

It isn't hard to do, 

Nothing to kill or die for, 

No religion too, 

Imagine all the people 

living life in peace. 

~ John Lennon, musician (1940-1980) 

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. 

~ Crowfoot, Native American warrior and orator (1821-1890) 

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

~ C. S. Lewis 

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

~ Emily Post, author and columnist (1872-1960) 

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. 

~ Gore Vidal, author (1925-2012) 

When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always. 

~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) 

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself. 

~ Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b. 1928) 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. 

~ Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910) 

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them. 

~ T.S. Eliot, poet (1888-1965) 

No battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. 

~ William Faulkner, novelist (1897-1962) 

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. 

~ Bruce Springsteen, musician (b. 1949) 

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. 

~ Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939) 

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. 

~ John Updike, writer (1932-2009) 

Force without wisdom falls of its own weight. 

~ Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE) 

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. 

~ Harper Lee, writer (b. 1926) 

Any training that does not include the emotions, mind and body is incomplete; knowledge fades without feeling. 

~ As read in a blog.....

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. 

~ Iroquois Nation Maxim 

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering. 

~ Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)  

We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not extensive ones, it is true; but our own little journeys, away and back again, are only little more than tree-wavings -- many of them not so much. 

~ John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one. 

~ Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850) 

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. 

~ Hans Hofmann, painter (1880-1966) 

I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself. 

~ Pietro Aretino, satirist and dramatist (1492-1556) 

It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time. 

~ Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983) 

Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety. 

~ Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824) 

A timid question will always receive a confident answer. 

~ Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872) 

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. 

~ John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704) 

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live. 

~ Holmes Rolston III, professor of philosophy (b. 1932) 

An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. 

~ Don Marquis, humorist and poet (1878-1937) 

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone. 

~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and novelist (1811-1896) 

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule. 

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) 

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. 

~ Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862) 

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. 

~ Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797) 

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. 

~ John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873) 

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance. 

~ Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797) 

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. 

~ Naguib Mahfouz, writer, Nobel laureate (1911-2006) 

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue. 

~ Robert King Merton, sociologist (1910-2003) 

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us. 

~ Robert Hayden, poet and educator (1913-1980) 

As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more. 

~ Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910) 

The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly. 

~ Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976) 

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward. 

~ Spanish proverb 

In wisdom gathered over time, I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

~ Ansel Adams

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

~ Aristotle Onassis 

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. 

~ Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778) 

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. 

~ Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963) 

Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance. 

~ Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790) 

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once. 

~ Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974) 

There is a field beyond all notions of right and wrong. Come, meet me there. 

~ Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273) 

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.
~ Lebanese proverb



There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life. 

~ Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592) 

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it. 
~ Madame De Stael, writer (1766-1817) 

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed. 

~ Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790) 

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated. 

~ Margaret Halsey, novelist (1910-1997) 

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

~ H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. 

~ Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961) 

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt. 

~ Robert M. Pirsig, author and philosopher (b. 1928) 

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. 

~ Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963) 

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. 

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945) 

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. 

~ Susan Sontag, author and critic (1933-2004) 

The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. 

~ Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), historian (1834-1902) 

Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls. 

~ Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860) 

Insanity is relative....

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

~ Ray Bradbury, writer (1920-2012)

The ring always believes....

The ring always believes that the finger lives for it.

~ Malcolm De Chazal, writer and painter (1902-1981)

We do not err because .....

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, novelist, Nobel laureate (1918-2008)

To die for an idea...

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, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them: children, duties, visits, bores, relations, the things that protect married people from each other.

~ Edith Wharton, novelist (1862-1937)

Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.

~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, psychiatrist and author (1926-2004)



Every human being's essential nature is perfect and faultless, but after years of immersion in the world we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature.

~ Lao-Tzu, philosopher (6th century BCE)

The man who dies rich dies disgraced.

~ Andrew Carnegie, industrialist (1835-1919)

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

~ Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
~ Steve Jobs

Since my house burned down, I now own a better view,  of the rising moon.

~ Mizuta Masahide, poet and samurai (1657-1723)

The big thieves hang the little ones.

~ Czech proverb

Congratulation: The civility of envy.

~ Ambrose Bierce, author and editor (1842-1914)

A hungry man is not a free man.

~ Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965)

Very few of us are what we seem.

~ Agatha Christie

Some stories are true that never happened.

~ Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b. 1928)

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

~ Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.

~ Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen), author (1885-1962)

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. 

~ Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b. 1928) 

Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.

~ John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)

The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity.

~ Jean Paul Richter, writer (1763-1825)

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. 

~ Willa Cather

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. 

~ Harriet Lerner, psychologist (b. 1944)

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higer tomorrow.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) 

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

~ Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.

~ Thornton Wilder, writer (1897-1975)

He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.

~ James Allen

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

~ Henry David Thoreau

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. 

~ The Buddha

May my silences become more accurate.

~ Theodore Roethke, poet (1908-1963)

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. 

~ William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910) 

Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.

~ Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920-2012)



Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.

~ Matsuo Basho, poet (1644-1694)

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

~ James M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-1937 )

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

~ Leo Buscaglia, author (1924-1998)

I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.

~ E.F. Schumacher, economist and author (1911-1977)

People change and forget to tell each other.

~ Lillian Hellman, playwright (1905-1984)

NEVER GIVE UP. No matter what is going on, Never give up. Develop the heart. Too much energy in your country is spent developing the mind instead of the heart. Be compassionate. Not just to your friends, but to everyone. Be compassionate. Work for peace in your heart and in the world. Work for peace. And I say again, never give up. No matter what is going on around you, never give up.

~  Dalai Lama

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. 

~ Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626) 

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

~ Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

~ Walt Whitman, poet (1819-1892)

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

~ Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745) 

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.

~ a Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882) 

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.

~ Charles de Montesquieu, philosopher and writer (1689-1755) 

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

~ Voltaire

One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.

~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

~ Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist, and psychiatrist (1905-1997)

That sorrow which is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy which is followed by sorrow. 

~ Saadi, poet (c.1213-1291) [Gulistan] 

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.

~ Washington Irving, writer (1783-1859)

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

~ Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.

~ Japanese proverb

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
~ Oscar Wilde

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

~ Pablo Picasso, painter, and sculptor (1881-1973)

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.

~ Max Beerbohm, essayist, parodist, and caricaturist (1872-1956)

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

~ Walt Whitman, poet (1819-1892) 

If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.

~ J.B. Phillips, writer and clergyman (1906-1982)

The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

~ John Muir, naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.

~  Leo Rosten, author (1908-1997)