management quotes

Milton Berle: 

A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.

Peter Drucker: 

Management means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.

majorities quotes

A. A. Milne: 

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Eugene V. Debs: 

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.

Henry David Thoreau: 

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

Jesse Jackson: 

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

John Bright: 

Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

Jose Ortega y Gasset: 

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence itis the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

Leonard H. Robbins: 

How a minority,
Reaching majority,
Seizing authority,
Hates a minority!

Lillian Hellman: 

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.

Soren Kierkegaard: 

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

Thomas Jefferson: 

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

lying quotes

Abraham Lincoln (attributed): 

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Adrienne Rich: 

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Anonymous: 

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble. (a combination of Proverbs 12:22 and Psalms 46:1)

Benjamin Disraeli: 

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. [attributed, perhaps incorrectly, by Mark Twain]

Carl Sagan: 

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Demosthenes: 

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

George Eliot: 

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

John F. Kennedy: 

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic

Mark Twain: 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Mark Twain: 

Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.

Mark Twain: 

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Montaigne: 

He who is not sure of his memory should not undertake the trade of lying.

Noam Chomsky: 

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Otto von Bismarck: 

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Sam Rayburn: 

Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time.

Sir Walter Scott: 

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
Marmion. Canto vi. Stanza 17.


Thomas Jefferson: 

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.

Virginia Woolfe: 

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Wendy Kaminer: 

To rationalize their lies, people -- and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose -- are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just.

luck quotes

E. B. White: 

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

Edward Gibbon: 

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

Edward Gibbon: 

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Edward Gibbon: 

All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.

George Santayana: 

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Jean Cocteau: 

Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?

John Barrymore: 

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.

John Lennon: 

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Lucille Ball: 

Luck? I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work -- and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Seneca: 

If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson (attributed): 

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

love quotes

Albert Einstein: 

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

Albert Einstein: 

How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

Albert Schweitzer: 

Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us], but allow [us] really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.â€� 

Alfred Adler: 

We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.

Alfred Tennyson: 

I hold it true, whate'er befall; 
I feel it, when I sorrow most; 
'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all.

Allan K. Chalmers: 

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.

Amy Bloom: 

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.

Amy Tan: 

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

Anais Nin: 

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Ann Landers: 

If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: 

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: 

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.

Barbara De Angelis: 

Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.

Barbara De Angelis: 

Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.

Bayard Rustin: 

When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.

Bayard Taylor: 

I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars grow old...

Bertrand Russell: 

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell: 

Three passions have governed my life: 
The longings for love, the search for knowledge, 
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind]. 

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. 
In the union of love I have seen 
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision 
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined. 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. 
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. 
I have wished to know why the stars shine. 

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, 
But always pity brought me back to earth; 
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart 
Of children in famine, of victims tortured 
And of old people left helpless. 
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, 
And I too suffer. 

This has been my life; I found it worth living. 
adapted


Bertrand Russell: 

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.

Bible: 

Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
I Corinthians 13:4-8

Blaise Pascal: 

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.

C.S. Lewis: 

Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.

Carl Jung: 

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carter Heyward: 

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

This entry continued ...
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: 

Tell me who admires and loves you, 
And I will tell you who you are.

Chaucer: 

For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.

This entry continued ...
Dale Evans: 

Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.

Denis Waitley: 

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Don Byas: 

You call it madness, but I call it love.

E.M. Forster: 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...

Ecclesiastes: 

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8


Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

I love humanity but I hate people.

Elbert Hubbard: 

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Elie Wiesel: 

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. 
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. 
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986) 


Elie Wiesel: 

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elizabeth Barret Browning: 

Whoso loves, believes the impossible.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox: 

All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Emily Dickinson: 

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.

Emily Dickinson: 

Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—

Emily Dickinson: 

Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.

Emma Goldman: 

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.

Erich Fromm: 

Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Ernest Becker: 

When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.

Euripides: 

He is not a lover who does not love forever.

Felix Adler: 

Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.

Francis David: 

We need not think alike to love alike.

Franklin P. Jones: 

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

Georg C. Lichtenberg: 

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.

George Jean Nathan: 

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

George MacDonald: 

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

George Sand: 

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

George Santayana: 

Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived. 
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906 


Goethe: 

To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.

H. L. Mencken: 

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. 
Prejudices, 1919 


HH the Dalai Lama: 

Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us.

This entry continued ...
HH the Dalai Lama: 

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]: 

...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other. 
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician 


Hazrat Inayat Khan: 

The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget. 
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology 


Helen Keller: 

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

Henri Nouwen: 

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

Henry David Thoreau: 

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

Henry David Thoreau: 

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.

Herman Hesse: 

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

Hermann Hesse: 

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

Hobbes (of Calvin and ...): 

I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.

Houssaye: 

Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.

Ingrid Bergman: 

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

Iris Murdock: 

We can only learn to love by loving.

Isha McKenzie-Mavinga: 

On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.

James Baldwin: 

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. 
Another Country, 1962


James D. Bryden: 

Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.

James Thurber and E.B. White: 

Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.

Jane Austen: 

Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.

Jane Austen: 

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.

Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire: 

We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.

Jean Goss: 

All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.

Jeanne Moreau: 

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.

Jessamyn West: 

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain. 
The Quaker Reader, 1962


Jimi Hendrix: 

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

Joan Vinge: 

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. 
The Snow Queen


John Lennon: 

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

Jonathan Swift: 

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Karl Menninger: 

Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. 

W.H. Murray

Katharine Hepburn: 

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Lily Tomlin: 

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

Lisa Hoffman: 

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

M. Scott Peck: 

Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.

Madeleine de Scudery: 

Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.

Mahatma Gandhi: 

Whether humanity will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings.

Marcel Proust: 

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.

Margaret Anderson: 

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

Margaret Guenther: 

[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.

Mark Twain: 

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain: 

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Mark Twain: 

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Adam, in Adam's Diary


Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Mary Oliver: 

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods

Mary Parrish: 

Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.

Mary S. Calderone: 

I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.

Matthew Arnold: 

Is it so small a thing 
To have enjoy'd the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring, 
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

Mitsugi Saotome: 

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Where there is love there is life.

Molleen Matsumura: 

Love is like a campfire: It may be sparked quickly, and at first the kindling throws out a lot of heat, but it burns out quickly. For long lasting, steady warmth (with delightful bursts of intense heat from time to time), you must carefully tend the fire. (2007)

Molleen Matsumura: 

Love is more than just a feeling: it's a process requiring continual attention. Loving well takes laughter, loyalty, and wanting more to be able to say, "I understand" than to hear, "You're right." (1999)

Molly Haskell: 

But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.

Mother Teresa: 

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

Mother Teresa: 

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: 

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility. 
from The Scarlet Letter


Norman Lindsay: 

The best love affairs are those we never had.

Oscar Hammerstein, II: 

Do you love me because I'm beautiful, 
or am I am beautiful because you love me?

Oscar Wilde: 

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. 
The Picture of Dorian Gray 


Paul Tillich: 

The first duty of love is to listen.

Pearl Bailey: 

What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.

Pearl S. Buck: 

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Pearl S. Buck: 

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.

Rainer Maria Rilke: 

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

Reinhold Niebuhr: 

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Robert Frost: 

Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better. 
Birches 


Robert Fulghum: 

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll: 

Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart 
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.

Robert Heinlein: 

Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Roger de Bussy-Rabutin: 

Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.

Rose Walker: 

Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...

This entry continued ...
Roy Croft: 

I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am 
When I am with you 
Love (first stanza) 


Rumi: 

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. 
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.

Rumi: 

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi: 

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Rumi: 

Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.

Saint Francis de Sales: 

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.

Samuel Butler: 

Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh

Sharon Welch: 

Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more 
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Simone Weil: 

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"

Sir Arthur Pinero: 

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.

Song of Solomon: 

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Spanish proverb: 

Where there is love, there is pain.

St. Augustine: 

Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.

Søren Kierkegaard: 

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.

Thomas Merton: 

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.

Tom Robbins: 

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. 
Still Life With Woodpecker 


Truman Capote: 

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. 
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948 


Unknown: 

Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.

Ursula K. LeGuin: 

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

Ursula LeGuin: 

Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Victor Frankl: 

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Hugo: 

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

W.H. Murray: 

...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much. 
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition


Washington Irving: 

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

Willa Cather: 

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

Willa Cather: 

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

William Arthur Ward: 

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.

William E. Gladstone : 

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

William Shakespeare: 

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

William Shakespeare: 

Love all, trust a few.

William Shakespeare: 

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite. 
"Romeo and Juliet" 


William Sloane Coffin: 

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: 

Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.

William Wordsworth: 

The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.

Zora Neale Hurston: 

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

Zora Neale Hurston: 

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

logic quotes

Bertrand Russell: 

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. 
"The Philosophy of Logical Atomism"


David Borenstein: 

Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.

Dorothy Thompson: 

The kind of intelligence a genius has is a different sort of intelligence. The thinking of a genius does not proceed logically. It leaps with great ellipses. It pulls knowledge from God knows where.

Edward Abbey: 

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Gloria Steinem: 

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Oliver Goldsmith: 

Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human mind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.

Rita Mae Brown: 

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.

literature quotes

Sir Walter Scott: 

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Thomas Moore: 

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

listening quotes

Hubert Humphrey: 

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

Margaret J. Wheatley: 

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

Mark Nepo: 

To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

Stephen Covey: 

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

limitations quotes

Arthur Schopenhauer: 

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Blaise Pascal: 

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Blaise Pascal: 

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Elbert Hubbard: 

In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

Elbert Hubbard: 

The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness, and evey man understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness.

Elbert Hubbard: 

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

Helen Keller: 

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 been opened for us.

Helen Keller: 

I seldom think of my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Rollo May: 

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Sharon Welch: 

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

life quotes

A. Powell Davies: 

Life is just a chance to grow a soul.

A. Powell Davies: 

Life is just a chance to grow a soul.

Abraham Lincoln: 

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Adrienne Rich: 

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Alan Bennett: 

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Albert Einstein: 

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

Albert Einstein: 

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Albert Schweitzer: 

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer: 

Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.

Albert Schweitzer: 

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.
Civilization and Ethics, 1949


Albert Schweitzer: 

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Alice Walker: 

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker: 

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Amelia Burr: 

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Anais Nin: 

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin: 

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin: 

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anais Nin: 

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

André Gide: 

The most decisive actions of our life ... are most often unconsidered actions.

Annie Dillard: 

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Barbara Kingsolver: 

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Barry Lopez: 

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
Arctic Dreams


Baruch Spinoza: 

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.

Ben Jonson: 

A good life is a main argument.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Franklin: 

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that the stuff life is made of.

Bertrand Russell: 

Three passions have governed my life: 
The longings for love, the search for knowledge, 
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind]. 

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. 
In the union of love I have seen 
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision 
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined. 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. 
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. 
I have wished to know why the stars shine. 

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, 
But always pity brought me back to earth; 
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart 
Of children in famine, of victims tortured 
And of old people left helpless. 
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, 
And I too suffer. 

This has been my life; I found it worth living. 
adapted


Bertrand Russell: 

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Brother David Steindl-Rast : 

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy -- because we will always want to have something else or something more.

Buckminster Fuller: 

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Buddha: 

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: 

Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived. 
played by Patrick Stewart, from the film "Star Trek: Generations" 


Carl Jung: 

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Carl Sandburg: 

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

Carl Sandburg: 

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Charlotte Bronte: 

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Chinese proverb: 

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

Colette: 

I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.

Colette: 

Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers.

Corita Kent: 

Love the moment. Flowers grow out of dark moments. Therefore, each moment is vital. It affects the whole. Life is a succession of such moments and to live each, is to succeed.

Corita Kent: 

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.

Dorothy Thompson: 

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson: 

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

E. B. White: 

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"


Edith Wharton: 

Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

My candle burns at both its ends;
It will not last the night;
But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends -- 
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Elbert Hubbard: 

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard: 

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived. Curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

Eleanor Roosevelt: 

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Elie Wiesel: 

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. 
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. 
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
(Oct. 1986) 


Elizabeth Drew: 

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

Emily Dickinson: 

Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—

Emily Dickinson: 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson: 

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

Emily Dickinson: 

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Erik H. Erikson: 

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Ernest Becker: 

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.

Ernest Becker: 

[W]e now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.

Ernest Becker: 

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?

Ernest Dowson: 

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

F. Forrester Church: 

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

Franklin P. Jones: 

Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.

Frederick Buechner: 

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

George Bernard Shaw: 

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

George Eliot: 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Sand: 

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

George Santayana: 

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Germaine Greer: 

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.

Goethe: 

A useless life is an early death.

HH the Dalai Lama: 

What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.

Harry Emerson Fosdick: 

Nothing else matters much -- not wealth, nor learning, nor even health -- without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.

Helen Keller: 

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Henri Frederick Amiel: 

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henry David Thoreau: 

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Henry James: 

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Henry Van Dyke: 

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

Tell me not, in mournful numbers, 
Life is but an empty dream! 
For the soul is dead that slumbers, 
and things are not what they seem. 
Life is real! Life is earnest! 
And the grave is not its goal; 
Dust thou art; to dust returnest, 
Was not spoken of the soul.

Immanuel Kant: 

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Immanuel Kant: 

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Isaac Asimov: 

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isadora Duncan: 

People do not live nowadays - they get about ten percent out of life.

James F. Bymes: 

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death

Jean-Paul Sartre: 

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Joan Baez: 

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

John Dewey: 

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey: 

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

John Lennon: 

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Joni Mitchell: 

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

Kalidasa: 

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the 
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes 
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Katharine Hepburn: 

Without discipline, there's no life at all.

Leo Buscaglia: 

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

Lord Byron: 

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

Madame de Stael: 

The mystery of existence is the connection between our faults and our misfortunes.

Marcus Aurelius: 

The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius: 

Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.

Marcus Aurelius: 

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

Margaret Fuller: 

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Maria Mitchell: 

Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

Service is what life is all about.

Marie Curie: 

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Mark Twain: 

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mark Twain: 

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain: 

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy.

Mark Twain: 

Let us so 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.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: 

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Mary Oliver: 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver: 

To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods

Matthew Arnold: 

Is it so small a thing 
To have enjoy'd the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring, 
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...

May Sarton: 

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

Where there is love there is life.

Mortimer Adler: 

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Nadine Stair (attributed, probably erroneously): 

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. 

You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have. 

If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies. 

The story behind this quotation


Norbert Capek: 

It is worthwhile to live
and fight courageously
for sacred ideals.

This entry continued ...
Norman MacEwan: 

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Norman Vincent Peale: 

Live your life and forget your age.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.

Omar N. Bradley: 

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.

Oscar Wilde: 

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Paul Anka: 

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've travelled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Paul Beattie: 

When My Mind is Still

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I remember things too easily forgotten:
The purity of early love,
The maturity of unselfish love that asks -- 
desires -- nothing but another's good,
The idealism that has persisted through all the tempest of life.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being.
It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety,
Can accept these harsh realities and can even grow
Because of these challenges to my essential being.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I can sense my basic humanity,
And then I know that all men and women are my brothers and sisters.
Nothing but my own fear and distrust can separate me from the love of friends.
If I can trust others, accept them, enjoy them,
Then my life shall surely be richer and more full.
If I can accept others, this will help them to be more truly themselves,
And they will be more able to accept me.

When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart,
I know how much life has given me:
The history of the race, friends and family,
The opportunity to work, the chance to build myself.
Then wells within me the urge to live more abundantly,
With greater trust and joy,
With more profound seriousness and earnest service,
And yet more calmly at the heart of life.


Paul Beattie was a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving in congregations including in Kansas City, Missouri, and last at the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, PA. He was also president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, among his many involvements.


Paul Bowles: 

... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment. 
from Gitanjali


Ralph Ellison: 

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Life is a progress, and not a station.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.: 

Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.

Ray Bradbury: 

Life is "trying things to see if they work."

Raymond Charles Barker: 

The principle of life is that life responds by corresponding; your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.

Robert Byrne: 

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

Robert Frost: 

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost: 

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

Roy H. Williams: 

Lives, like money, are spent. What are you buying with yours?

Sarah Ban Breathnach: 

An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.

Sarah Bernhardt: 

Life begets life. Energy becomes energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sean O'Casey: 

I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.

Seneca: 

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Sharon Welch: 

Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

Sophia Lyon Fahs: 

Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done.

Stephen Covey: 

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.

Theodore Rubin: 

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Thich Nhat Hanh: 

Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.

Thomas Jefferson: 

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

Tom Lehrer: 

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Toni Morrison: 

Birth, life, and death -- each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Unknown: 

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

Ursula K. LeGuin: 

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

Victor Frankl: 

If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

Victor Frankl: 

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

Victor Frankl: 

We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.

Victor Hugo: 

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

Virginia Satir: 

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

Wallace Stegner: 

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Will Rogers: 

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

William Blake: 

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

William James: 

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life. 
The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902


William James: 

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact.
Is Life Worth Living?


Winston Churchill: 

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Zeno: 

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

liberals quotes

Adlai E. Stevenson: 

What do I believe? As an American I believe in generosity, in liberty, in the rights of man. These are social and political faiths that are part of me, as they are, I suppose, part of all of us. Such beliefs are easy to express. But part of me too is my relation to all life, my religion. And this is not so easy to talk about. Religious experience is highly intimate and, for me, ready words are not at hand. 
speech, Libertyville, Illinois, May 21, 1954


Adlai Stevenson: 

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. [1952] 

Ambrose Bierce: 

Conservative: a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Andy Rooney: 

Democrats (I think to myself) are liberals who believe the people are basically good, but that they need government help to organize their lives. They believe in freedom so fervently that they think it should be compulsory. They believe that the poor and ignorant are victims of an unfair system and that their circumstances can be improved if we give them help. Republicans (I think to myself) are conservatives who think it would be best if we faced the fact that people are no damned good. They think that if we admit that we have selfish, acquisitive natures and then set out to get all we can for ourselves by working hard for it, that things will be better for everyone. They are not insensitive to the poor, but tend to think the poor are impoverished because they won't work. They think there would be fewer of them to feel sorry for if the government did not encourage the proliferation of the least fit among us with welfare programs.

Aristotle: 

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Barbara Ehrenreich: 

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Bertrand Russell : 

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Christopher Bigsby and Malcolm Bradbury: 

You know what they say: if God had been a Liberal, we wouldn't have had the ten commandments. We'd have had the ten suggestions.

Dave Barry: 

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

G. K. Chesterton: 

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

G. William Domhoff: 

There is more to American politics than fat cats and their political friends. There are serious-minded liberals who fight the good fight on many issues, ecologically oriented politicians who remain true to their cause, and honest people of every political stripe who are not beholden to any wealthy people. But there are not enough of them, and they are often worn down by the constant pressure from lobbyists, lawyers and conventional politicians.

George Washington: 

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

H. L. Mencken: 

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

James W. Skillen: 

American liberals and conservatives share much of the same political heritage. Originally the term Liberal referred to the political and economic ideal of liberating individuals from unrepresentative and arbitrary governments. Early liberalism set in motion patterns for the rule of law that would guarantee individual rights, representation in law making, access to the courts, and protection of private property. Both conservatives and liberals are Liberal in this sense. But whereas American conservatives of various stripes have continued to place primary emphasis on individual freedom, the autonomy of private institutions, and limits to government in the economic area, American liberals have more frequently appealed to government to advance the liberation of individuals from economic, racial, and political disadvantages in society as a whole.

Jimmy Carter: 

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

John Adams: 

Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.

John Bright: 

I am for peace, retrenchment and reform, the watchword of the great Liberal Party thirty years ago.

John F. Kennedy: 

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then ... we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal." [September 14, 1960]

John Stuart Mill: 

The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Jose Ortega y Gasset: 

Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence itis the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

Margaret Mead: 

The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.

Marian Wright Edelman: 

My faith has been the driving thing of my life. I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.

Mort Sahl: 

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

P. J. O'Rourke: 

The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it.

Paulo Freire: 

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

Peter C. Newman: 

Conservatives usually prefer twin beds, which may contribute to the fact that Canada has more Liberals.

Philip Slater: 

Change can take place only when liberal and radical pressures are both strong. Intelligent liberals have always recognized the debt they owe to radicals, whose existence permits liberals to push further than they would otherwise have dared, all the while posing as compromisers and mediators. Radicals, however, have been somewhat less sensible of their debt to liberals, partly because of the rather single-minded discipline radicals are almost forced to maintain, plagued as they always are by liberal backsliding and timidity on the one hand and various forms of self-destructiveness and romantic posing on the other.... Liberal reforms and radical change are thus complementary rather than antagonistic. Together they make it possible continually to test the limits of what can be done. Liberals never know whether the door is unlocked because they are afraid to try it. Radicals, on the other hand, miss many opportunities for small advances because they are unwilling to settle for so little.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. 
The Conservative


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. 
The Conservative


Robert Anton Wilson: 

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert Frost: 

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Robert S. McElvaine: 

Most liberals never lost sight of the potential for evil in big government. They have consistently opposed government power in matters of personal and political belief. Liberals are not unconcerned with economic liberty, but they have come to believe that the common good requires that social justice be given a higher priority than absolute economic freedom. Conservatives are—and always have been—on the other side of both questions. They are much more prone than liberals to limiting personal and political liberties, but they place the freedom of an individual to do as he pleases in the economic realm at the top of their concerns. Social justice has held a lower priority for conservatives, from the days of Alexander Hamilton when they favored strong government as a means of protecting their economic privileges to the days of Ronald Reagan when they see government as an instrument of social justice and therefore a threat to their economic position.

Wendy Kaminer: 

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

West Wing (television show): 

Somebody came along and said 'liberal' means 'soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to.' And instead of saying, 'Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave it to Beaver trip back to the '50s,' we cowered in the corner and said, 'Please don't hurt me.'

Will Rogers: 

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat.

William E. Gladstone : 

Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.

William Ralph Inge: 

There are two kinds of fools: one says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better."

Willis Player: 

A liberal is a person whose interests aren't at stake, at the moment.

Winston Churchill: 

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

leadership quotes

Adlai Stevenson: 

It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.

Albert Einstein: 

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.

Carl Sagan: 

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: 

You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

Edwin H. Friedman: 

Leadership can be thought of as a capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.

Elizabeth Dole: 

What you always do before you make a decision is consult. The best public policy is made when you are listening to people who are going to be impacted. Then, once policy is determined, you call on them to help you sell it.

Eric Hoffer: 

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Ernest Becker: 

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.

Eugene V. Debs: 

I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and mis-representatives of the masses -- you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.

Everett Dirksen: 

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Faye Wattleton: 

The only safe ship in a storm is leadership.

Faye Wattleton: 

Whoever is providing leadership needs to be as fresh and thoughtful and reflective as possible to make the very best fight.

H. Ross Perot: 

Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

Henrik Ibsen: 

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

Herbert B. Swope: 

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.

Isaac Newton: 

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.

James Callaghan: 

A leader must have the courage to act against an expert's advice.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner: 

There's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner: 

[Y]ou must unite your constituents around a common cause and connect with them as human beings.

Jawaharlal Nehru: 

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

Jesse Jackson: 

Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things.

John Gardner: 

Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.

John Gardner: 

Most important, leaders can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.

John Naisbitt: 

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.

John Quincy Adams: 

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

Kenneth Blanchard: 

The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

Margaret Chase Smith: 

Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any measures.

Margaret J. Wheatley: 

When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.

Mohandas Gandhi: 

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.

Noam Chomsky: 

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Peter Drucker: 

What is the managers job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite -- and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to problems rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimal impact on results.

This entry continued ...
Peter Drucker: 

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Peter F. Drucker: 

Leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise.

Peter Senge: 

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management.... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.

Ralph Nader: 

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Robert Coles: 

Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?

Robert Greenleaf: 

Good leaders must first become good servants. 

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspiration with others.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor: 

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.

Rosabeth Moss Kantor: 

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.

Rosalynn Carter: 

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

Rosalynn Carter: 

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go but ought to be.

Stephen Covey: 

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Susan B. Anthony: 

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

Theodore Hesburgh: 

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision.

Tom Peters: 

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.

Tony Blair: 

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.

Unknown: 

Some leaders are born women.

Vince Lombardi: 

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Walter Lippman: 

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

Warren Bennis: 

The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.

Warren G. Bennis: 

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born -- that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

Winston Churchill: 

The price of greatness is responsibility.