Quotations: Inspirational
These quotations offer inspiring words of advice. Hopefully the wisdom they contain will brighten your day.
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"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."
-Abraham Lincoln
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"Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself."
-Richard M. Nixon
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"The greatness comes not when things go always good for you. But the greatness comes when you're really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes. Because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain."
-Richard M. Nixon
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"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
-Herman Cain
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"Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, buy you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way."
-David Whyte
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"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
-Robert Frost
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"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-Frank Herbert
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"If you treat a person as he is, he will remain as he is. If you treat him for what he could be, he will become what he could be."
-???
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"Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which, once you've got it, you might be smart enough to see it is what you would have wanted had you known."
-Garrison Keillor
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"A man learns to skate by staggering about making a fool of himself; indeed, he progresses in all things by making a fool of himself."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-Albert Einstein
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"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau
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"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for."
-John A. Shedd
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"Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do."
-Thomas Aquinas
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"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow grow, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation."
-George Washington
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"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see."
-John Burrough
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"Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was."
-Richard L. Evans
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"In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action."
-Aristotle
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"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.... Make big plans... aim high in hope and work."
-Daniel H. Burnham
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"We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless."
-James W. Fulbright
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"If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing."
-Saint Augustine
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"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
-William Shakespeare
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"The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been."
-Henry Kissinger
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"Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions."
-Harold Geneen
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"The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future."
-Alfred North Whitehead
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"If we deny love that is given to us, if we refuse to give love because we fear pain or loss, then our lives will be empty, our loss greater."
-???
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"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
-Henri Nouwen
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"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates."
-Thomas Szasz
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"He that feareth is a slave, were he never so rich, were he never so powerful. But he that is without fear is king of all the world."
-E. R. Eddison
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"Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
-Vilfredo Pareto
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"One does not discover new continents without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
-Andre Gide
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"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
-Agnes de Mille
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"If you stop searching, you stop living, because then you're dwelling in the past. If you're not reaching forward to any growth or future, you might as well be dead."
-Wynn Bullock
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"The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself."
-John Fowles
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"There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be."
-John Fowles
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"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
-Thomas Paine
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"That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had."
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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"I share no man's opinions; I have my own."
-Ivan Turgenev
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"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
-e. e. cummings
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"That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong."
-William J.H. Boetcker
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"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."
-Albert Einstein
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"Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."
-Mark Twain
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"If people talk negatively about you, live so that no one will believe them."
-???
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"Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many."
-???
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"One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words."
-Goethe
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"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
-James Baldwin
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"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
-Albert Einstein
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"I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Toombstone, Arizona. It says: "Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest." I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have."
-Harry Truman
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"If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well."
-Martin Luther King, Jr
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"Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny."
-???
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"We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know."
-W. H. Auden
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"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
-Thomas Paine
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"The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts life."
-William James
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"I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."
-Benedict Spinoza
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"The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make."
-Aristotle
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"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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"Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind."
-Louis Pasteur
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"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."
-Dale Carnegie
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"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
-Helen Keller
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"The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it."
-Epicurus
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"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant."
-Horace
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"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
-???
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"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
-Douglas Adams
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"Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well."
-Josh Billings
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"I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
-Ernest Hemingway
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"You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses."
-Ziggy
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"The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers."
-Marin Luther King, Jr.
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"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind."
-Leonardo DaVinci
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"Originality is not seen in single words or even sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
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"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort."
-John Ruskin
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"The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life."
-Henry Ford
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"I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty."
-John D. Rockefeller
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"Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height."
-Buddha
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"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves."
-Buddha
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"The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm."
-Fred Dehner
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"You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment."
-Alvin Toffler
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"Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth."
-Mahatma Gandhi
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"The future belongs to those who prepare for it today."
-Malcolm X
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"Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies."
-Philip Dormer Chesterfield
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"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind."
-Samuel Johnson
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"The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places."
-Ernest Hemingway
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"The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur."
-Vince Lombardi
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"You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life. This is not an easy struggle. Indeed, it may be the most difficult task in the world, for opening the door to your own life is, in the end, more difficult than opening the doors to the mysteries of the universe."
-Daisaku Ikeda
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"To be good, we must do good; and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power."
-Tryon Edwards
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"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 and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form."
-Albert Einstein
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"What is outside yourself does not convey much worth; Clothes do not make the man, the saddle not the horse."
-Angelius Silesius
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"One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life."
-Bertrand Russell
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"We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."
-Ray Bradbury
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"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
-Heraclitus
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"Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks."
-Will Durant
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"Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
-Victor Hugo
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"Better contraceptives will control population only if people will use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior."
-B. F. Skinner
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"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this."
-The Impossible Dream
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"You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will chose free will."
-RUSH
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"This above all: to thine own self be true."
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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"Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place."
-Mark Twain
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"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees."
-Dolores Ibarruri
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"Doubt sees the obstacles
faith sees the way.
Doubt sees the darkest night
Faith sees the day.
Doubt dreads to take a step
Faith soars on high.
Doubt questions 'who believes?'
Faith answers, 'I.'"
-???
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"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia."
-Charles Schultz
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"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
-William Faulkner
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"What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?"
-Dr. Robert Schuller
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"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"One ship drives east and the other drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
'Tis the set of the sails and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go."
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Winds of Fate
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"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."
-William Arthur Ward
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"To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one."
-Jack Kornfield
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"Virtue is its own reward."
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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"The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates
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"The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress."
-Bertrand Russell
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"It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts."
-Millard Fuller
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"Success is that old ABC -- ability, breaks, and courage."
-Charles Luckman
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"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
-William James
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"If you can't return a favor, pass it on."
-Louise Brown
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"We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity."
-The Kabbalah
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"There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. Similarly, there is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this."
-Miyamoto Musashi
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"If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives."
-Robert South
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"Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon."
-Oscar Wilde
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"A fellow can't keep people from having a bad opinion of him, but he can keep them from being right about it."
-???
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"Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few."
-Pythagoras
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"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."
-Heraclitus
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"When you come right down to it, all you have is your self. Your self is a sun with a thousand rays in your belly. The rest is nothing."
-Pablo Picasso
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"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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"The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us."
-Loren Eiseley
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"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
-Shakespeare
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"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
-William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
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"Every man is the architect of his own fortune."
-Appius Claudius
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"Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent."
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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"Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of angels."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."
-Theodore Roosevelt
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"To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for."
-Geoffrey Warnock
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"To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top."
-???
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"The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going."
-???
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"Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
-David Lloyd George
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"The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures, the clouds above constantly dissolving into new formations - each gift of nature possessing its own radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony."
-Ruth Bernhard
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"A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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"Know people for who they are rather than for what they are."
-Anthony J. D'Angelo
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"If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse....I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist."
-Ayn Rand
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"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)"
-Mark Twain
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