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

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy — ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. ”
– Bertrand Russell

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
– Sidney J. Harris

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
– John A. Shedd

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling

Just do your best, and never mind perfection:

“A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.”
–Cardinal Newman

“Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.”
–Alfred de Musset

“He is lifeless that is faultless.”
–English proverb

“The best things in life aren’t things.”
— Art Buchwald

“The closest to perfection anyone ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.”
–Stanley J. Randall

“A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.”
–Anon

“If one is cruel to himself, how can we expect him to be compassionate with others?”
–Hasdai Ibn Shaprut

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Krishnamurti

“If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.” –Henry Fielding

“The only problems money can solve are money problems.”
–Laurence Peter

“If the only tool that you have is a hammer, you tend to treat every problem as a nail.”
— Abraham Maslow

Don’t limit yourself to learning from experience:

“This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.”
–Goethe

“Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.”
–Minna Antrim

“A man who is so dull / that he can learn only by personal experience / is too dull to learn / anything important by experience.”
–Don Marquis

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls, and looks like work.”
–Thomas Edison

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”
— John Foster Dulles

“Fear to let fall a drop and you spill a lot.”
–Malay proverb

“I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”
–W. E. Henley (Invictus)

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he’ll eat for weeks!
–Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005

“Disappointments are to the soul what the thunder-storm is to the air.” –J. C. F. von Schiller

“Hail to the morning! Come down to me my beautiful unknown.”
–Jessica Powers

“Its OK if you mess up. You should give yourself a break.”
–Billy Joel

Choose your friends carefully:

“Tell me who you frequent and I will tell you who you are.”
–French proverb

“A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools.”
–Thomas Fuller

“Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.”
–George Washington

“If you spend more time asking appropriate questions rather than giving answers or opinions, your listening skills will increase.”
–Brian Koslow

“We are all of us richer than we think we are.”
–Michel de Montaigne

“Once the ‘what’ is decided, the ‘how’ always follows. We must not make the ‘how’ an excuse for not facing and accepting the ‘what.'”
–Pearl Buck

“Success is not forever and failure isn’t fatal.”
— Don Shula

“The end of labor is to gain leisure.”
–Aristotle

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
–Laurence J. Peter

“Only a person who can live with himself can enjoy the gift of leisure.” –Henry Greber

“The more you are willing to accept responsibility for your actions, the more credibility you will have.”
–Brian Koslow

Be wary of eloquence:

“The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.”
–Thomas Babington Macaulay

“Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.”
–Charles-Maurice de Tallyrand

“Take eloquence and wring its neck.”
–Paul Verlaine

“For fast-acting relief try slowing down.”
–Lily Tomlin

“To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything, or nothing, about it.”
–Olin Miller

“A well-spent day brings happy sleep.”
–Leonardo da Vinci

“Your past is always going to be the way it was. Stop trying to change it.” –Anon.

“To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him… two.”
–Norman Douglas

“To increase your effectiveness, make your emotions subordinate to your commitments.”
–Brian Koslow

“If you let fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.” –Katherine B. Hathaway

“Never mistake motion for action.”
–Ernest Hemingway

“The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.” –John Mason Brown

“There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”
–Erich Fromm

“A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.”
–John Lubbock

“Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson

“When shall we live if not now?”
–M. F. K. Fisher

“Some people are making such thorough preparation for rainy days that they aren’t enjoying today’s sunshine.”
–William Feather

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” –Albert Camus

“Ask yourself the secret of YOUR success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.”
–Richard Bach

“People will feel safer around you and speak truthfully to you when they feel you are listening intently to them.”
–Brian Koslow

“The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
–James A. Garfield

Henry Van Dyke teaches, “There is a loftier ambition than merely
to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind
a little higher.” Regardless of how much we possess, there is
always someone we can raise up a bit higher. And in so doing, we
find that we will stand taller, too.

“Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?”
–Logan Pearsall Smith

“The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.”
–Napoleon

“One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes.” –Nietzsche

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
–Michel de Montaigne

“One cannot both feast and become rich.”
–Ashanti proverb

“We fail far more often by timidity than by over-daring.”
–David Grayson

“Be willing to trust your instincts, especially if you cannot find answers elsewhere.”
–Brian Koslow

“We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”
–Carlos Castenada

“To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.”
–Mother Teresa

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
–Anon.

“If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.”
–Horne Tooke

“You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.”
–Billy Wilder

“A brave arm makes a short sword long.”
–Anon.

“It’s surprising how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” — Abraham Lincoln

“A hero is a man who does what he can.”
–Romain Rolland

“There is no pillow as soft as a clear conscience.”
— John Wooden

“All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” –Charles Kingsley

“Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”
–Adlai Stevenson

“None is so rich as to throw away a friend.”
–Turkish proverb

“Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change.”
–Schiller

“Why not learn to enjoy the little things ñ there are so many of them.” –Anon.

“In the middle of every difficulty lies
opportunity.”
–Albert Einstein

“It’s better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.”
–Sister Elizabeth Kenny

“Sadness flies away on the wings of time.’
–Jean de La Fontaine

“Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the money will come.”
–Greer Garson

“…we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.”
–Agnes Repplier

Nothing sabotages a career as effectively as fear and lack of self-confidence. The way to conquer anxiety is identify what scares you and then ask yourself the question, “What can I do to overcome this fear?”

“Tomorrow is the only day in the year that appeals to a lazy man.”
–Jimmy Lyons

“The only kind of courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.”
–Mignon McLaughlin

“If you think it’s going to rain, it will.”
–Clint Eastwood

“No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today.” –Brendan Francis

“To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.”
–Tacitus

“Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.”
–Goethe

“If you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, your life will be safe, expedient and thin.”
–Katharine B. Hathaway

“To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
–Sir James Jeans

“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.”
–O. S. Marden

“Do not look back on happiness, or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.”
–Henry Ward Beecher

“There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.”
–General Douglas MacArthur

“Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”
-Kurt Vonnegut
–Julia Child

“Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.”
–Cullen Hightower

“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”
–Thomas Jefferson

“You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is
not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly
believing it, will make you less miserable now.”–Abraham Lincoln

It is true that few of us seem to stay in that peaceful valley
for long. But, as someone aptly said, “The truly happy person is
one who can enjoy the scenery while on detour.” Detours, after
all, are temporary.

Get by with a little help from your friends:

“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”
–Benjamin Franklin

“There is no advertisement as powerful as a positive reputation traveling fast.” –Brian Koslow

“A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.”
–Daniel J. Boorstin

“The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.”
–Ernest Newman

Accept yourself – and then get on with life:

“Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have.”
–Doris Mortman

“My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.”
–Ertha Kitt

“If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone.”
–Maxwell Maltz

“Well done is better than well said.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“The best people to listen to are those who have already been successful accomplishing exactly what you are seeking to accomplish.”
–Brian Koslow

“You always miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take.” — Wayne Gretzky

“One major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.”
– Edward R. Murrow

Don’t overestimate what you know:

“To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”
– A. B. Alcott

“A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.” –Laurence Peter

“Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.”
–Daniele Vare

“There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.”
–Robert Half

“Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.”
–Dr. William Menninger

“Never make negative comments or spread rumors about anyone. It depreciates their reputation and yours.”
–Brian Koslow

“Do you want to injure someone’s reputation? Don’t speak ill of him, speak too well.”
–Andre Siegfried

“A flatterer is a man who tells you your opinion and not his own.”
–Anon.

“Compliments were made for strangers, not for friends.”
–Anon.

“Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”
– Groucho Marx

“When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.”
–John Ruskin

“It’s not enough to be busy . . . the question is: what are we busy about?”
–Henry David Thoreau

“The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness, you’ll never find it.”
–C. P. Snow

“Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.”
–Charles Kettering

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
–Hal Borland

“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.”
–Kahlil Gibran

“Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.”
–C. W. Ceram

“The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men.”
–Julius Charles Hare

Philosopher James Allen advised, “Above all be of single aim;
have a legitimate and useful purpose, and devote yourself
unreservedly to it.” It’s about cause and effect. A life without
cause is a life without effect. Or put another way, a person not
devoted to a cause will have little effect on the world. It
begins with finding the right note.

I like the way Helen Keller said it: “Many persons have a wrong
idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained
through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy
purpose.”

“The best investment is in the tools of one’s own trade.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“The Japanese have a word for it. It’s judo – the art of conquering by yielding. The western equivalent of judo is, “Yes, dear.'”
–J. P. McAvoy

“Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.”
–Dale Carnegie

“Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
–Dinah Shore

“There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.”
–Alfred Korzybski

“The best way out of a problem is through it.”
–Anon.

“You must have long range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures.”
–Charles C. Noble

“Excellence is not an act but a habit.”
–Aristotle

The cornerstone of excellence is caring about quality. That means getting past the idea that a job is “good enough.” Seek out sources of inspiration. Take risks. Strive for greatness. And do it not just once in a while when the mood strikes you, but reach for excellence with every assignment. Follow this formula and you’ll build a reputation as someone who can be relied upon for great work.

Attitude is everything! It is well said that “we cannot direct
the wind, but we can adjust our sails.”

“The covetous man is always poor.”
–Claudian

“That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“All fortune belongs to him who has a contented mind.”
–The Panchatantra

“Every horse thinks his own pack heaviest.”
–Thomas Fuller

“When you learn to live for others, they will live for you.”
–Paramahansa Yogananda

“When you produce results you gain credibility. When you have credibility, you will have an easier time producing results.”
–Brian Koslow

“All looks yellow to a jaundiced eye.”
– Alexander Pope

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
–Charles Dickens

“If at first you don’t succeed you’re running about average.”
–M. H. Alderson

“Two farmers each claimed to own a certain cow. While one pulled on its head and the other pulled on its tail, the cow was milked by a lawyer.”
–Jewish parable

“I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.”
–Dr. Joyce Brothers

“We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
–Chinese proverb

Don’t be bullied by what “everyone else” is doing:

“What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.”
–Auguste Preault

“A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.”
–Arthur Schopenhauer

“The race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.”
–Carl Van Doren

“You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”
–Walt Disney

“Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.”
–Storm Jameson

If you have to look at the calendar, concentrate on today’s date:

“One today is worth two tomorrows.”
–Benjamin Franklin

“The future belongs to those who live intensely in the present.”
–Anon.

“You have enemies? Good! It means you’ve stood up for something at least once in your life.”
–Anon.

“Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.”
–Goethe

“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”
–Stephen Levine

“Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount.”
–Clare Booth Luce

“Wealth lost – something lost; Honor lost – much lost; Courage lost – all lost.”
–German proverb

“Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without it we can’t practice any other virtue with consistency.”
–Maya Angelou

“The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.”
–Bernard M. Baruch

“The more people you influence, the more power you have.”
–Brian Koslow

“Worry is the interest paid on trouble before it falls due.”
–W. R. Inge

“The only way to keep a good reputation is to continuously earn it.” –Brian Koslow

“If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?”
–Thomas a Kempis

“People are more easily led than driven.”
–David H. Fink

“We should not let our fears hold us back from pursuing our hopes.”
–John F. Kennedy

“There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purpose of human life.”
–John Stuart Mill

“What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.”
–Bertrand Russell

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim.”
–Annie Dillard

“An optimist is one who makes the best of it when he gets the worst of it.”
–Laurence Peter

“Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.”
–Helen Keller

“Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them.” –Voltaire

“The first job is to get some clarity of understanding about yourself, what you are, and where you are going.”
–Harry D. Gideonse

“The only effort worth making is the one it takes to learn the geography of one’s own nature.”
–Paul Bowles

Imperturbability — it’s the result of a peace that passes
understanding. For serenity is not freedom from the storm, but
peace amid the storm.

“Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.”
–Burton Hills

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
–William Shakespeare

“Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.”
— Arabic saying
Don’t be afraid to buck the trend:

“Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.” –Thomas Carlyle

“Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.” –Sir Robert Peel

“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” –Rita Mae Brown

“The moment you blame anyone for anything, your relationship and your personal power deteriorate.”
–Brian Koslow

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
–Mary Lou Cook

“Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them. Strong, able, alert men go after opportunity.”
–B. C. Forbes

Don’t demand perfection from yourself:

“We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. The man is best who has fewest.”
–Horace

“We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“To do all that one is able to do is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do is to be a god.”
–Napoleon

“Fear is the father of courage and the mother of safety.”
–Henry H. Tweedy

“My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”
–Oprah Winfrey

“Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that is gone.”
–Shakespeare

“Many an optimist has become rich simply by buying out a pessimist.”
–Laurence Peter

“Time bears away all things.”
–Virgil

“Your three best doctors are faith, time, and patience.”
–fortune cookie

“Courtesy is the shortest distance between two people.”
–Proverb

“In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.”
–Thomas Jefferson

“The strongest people aren’t always the people who win
but the people who don’t give up when they lose.”
–anon

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.”
–Albert Einstein

“Confidence and certainty will get you further than anything else will.”
–Brian Koslow

“Happiness is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”
–Benjamin Franklin

“An excuse is a lie guarded.”
–Jonathan Swift

“A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”
–Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Don’t gripe, get with it:

“You can overcome anything if you don’t bellyache.”
–Bernard Baruch

“Suffering isn’t ennobling, recovery is.”
–Christian Barnard

“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”
– Baruch Spinoza

“Initiative consists of doing the right thing without being told.” –Irving Mack

“Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee ate ahead . . . . You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.”
–Kathleen Norris

Use your money; don’t let it use you:

“Banks and riches are chains of gold, but still chains.”
–Edmund Ruffin

“To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave is like supposing we could drink all day and stay sober.”
–Logan Pearsall Smith

“Few rich men own their property. Their property owns them.”
–Robert G. Ingersoll

“It’s never too late to be
who you might have been.”
–George Eliot

“God gives every bird its food, but he does not throw it into the nest.”
–Josiah G. Holland

“If Fortune calls, offer him a seat.”
–Yiddish proverb

“To play it safe is not to play.”
–Robert Altman

Never stop making new friends:

“He alone has lost the art to live who cannot win new friends.”
–S. Weir Mitchell

“Since there is nothing so worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.”
–Francesco Guicciardini

“A man’s growth is seen in the successive choir of his friends.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Forgive and forget:

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
–William Blake

“Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less”
–Rabbi Julius Gordon

He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.”
–Thomas Fuller

“The ultimate of being successful is the luxury of giving yourself the time to do what you want to do.”
–Leontyne Price

“To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.”
–Sir Walter Scott

“If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.”
–Elbert Hubbard

“I have come to realize that all my trouble with living has come from fear and smallness within me.”
–Angela L. Wozniak

“Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Be wise, not just smart:

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
–William James

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
–Alfred Lord Tennyson

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
–Francis Bacon

“Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.”
— George Herbert

“The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.”
–Christian Bovee

“Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”
–Shakespeare

“What you can see, yet cannot
see over, is as good as infinite.” Get some altitude and you will
be able to see beyond the problem!
–Thomas Carlyle

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
–Annie Dillard

Stay skeptical:

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

“Never assume the obvious is true.”
–William Safire

“If you believe everything you read, you better not read.”
–Japanese proverb

Here is an experiment: look for and find as much joy as possible
for one full day. Try to enjoy the people you run into, the work
you do, your leisure time and your relationships. Don’t forget to
enjoy yourself — and take enough time to enjoy God. Try this
experiment for one full day, and by evening you will bask in the
glow of a rekindled spirit.
It just takes a day to find joy along the way.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
–Vincent van Gogh

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment”
–Dorothy Nevill

“There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” – Winston Churchill

“It is never to late to be what you might have been.”
–George Eliot

“The king is the man who can.”
–Thomas Carlyle

Turn the tables on trouble:

“Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.”
–Francis Bacon

“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”
–African proverb

“Wherever you go, preach. Use words if necessary.”
–Francis of Assisi

“The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.” –Thomas A. Edison

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.” –Marie Curie

“If you keep doing things like you’ve always done them, what you’ll get is what you’ve already got.”
–Anon.

Don’t let winning go to your head:

“Even victors are by victory undone.”
–John Dryden

“You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”
–Lou Holtz

Nirvana is a gentle, quiet, peaceful satisfaction, devoid of desire and possession.

My question is this: Are you keeping pace with somebody else? Are
you allowing other people to set your standards for you? What
about your standards, or principles, for moral behavior? Or
guidelines for what kind of attitudes you want, or how happy your
relationships should be? Do you keep pace with those around you,
or do you decide yourself just how you will live your life? The
truth is…only you are qualified to determine what your
standards will be.
Set your standards too low, and you’ll know only
discontent. But set high standards and you can live an
immeasurably full and worthwhile life. For only when you reach
for the best that is within yourself, will you experience great
living.
Who is setting your standards?

“If you spend more time asking appropriate questions rather than giving answers or opinions, your listening skills will increase.”
–Brian Koslow

“No heaven can come to us unless our hearts
find rest in today. Take heaven!
No peace lies in the future that is not
hidden in his present moment. Take peace!
The gloom of this world is but a shadow.
Behind it, yet within reach, is joy.
There is a radiance and glory in the
darkness, could we but see, and to see
we have only to look. I beseech you to look.
Life is so generous a giver….”
–Fra Giovanni

“Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.”
–Anon.

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.”
–Thomas A. Edison

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep”
–E. Joseph Cossman

“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
–William Faulkner

“Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.”
–David Frost

“Television: chewing gum for the eyes.”
–Frank Lloyd Wright

“I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness,’ but that doesn’t work.”
–Anon

“The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.”
–Anon.

“be faithful to that which exists within
yourself.” The answers you seek may be very close indeed.
–Andre Gide

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”
–Rachel Carson

Men of few words are the best men,”
–Shakespeare (Henry V)

“It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.”
–Sally Field

“It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not.”
–Anon

“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
–Michael Jordan

“None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.”
–Benjamin Whichcote

“One today is worth two tomorrows”
–Benjamin Franklin

“All forms of fear produce fatigue.”
–Bertrand Russell

“The soul of dispatch is decision.”
–William Hazlitt

“Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.”
–Johann Kaspar Lavater

Think of jealousy as an engine likely to backfire and burn you:

“The jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.”
–Dorothy Dix

“The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.”
–William Penn

“If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.”
–Charley Reese

ìTime is the most valuable thing a man can spend.î
–Laertius Diogenes

ìSelf-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead to sovereign power.î
–Lord Tennyson

ìIt takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.î
–James A. Michener

Donít work yourself sick:

ìSo many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then have to spend their wealth to regain their health.î
–A.J. Reb Materi

ìThe first wealth is health.î
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

ìA man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time – pills or stairs.î
–Joan Welsh

ìTo the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution.î
–Joe Cordare

ìMen, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose direction and begin to bend.î
–Walter Savage Landor

ìCourage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.î
–Francois de Fenelon

Make an effort to communicate:

ìTwo monologues do not make a dialogue.î
–Jeff Daly

ìBe careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.î
–Ira Gassen

ìMost conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.î
–Margaret Millar

Voltaire, asked on his deathbed to renounce Satan: ìThis is no time to make new enemies.î

“Happy is the man and happy is he alone,
He who can call today his own.
He who is secure within can say,
‘Tomorrow do thy worst,
for I have lived today.'”
–Horace

Make your own acquaintance:

ìIt’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
–Lucille Ball

ìWe visit others as a matter of social obligation. How long has it been since we have visited with ourselves?î
–Morris Adler

Donít get too lost in your thoughts:

ìYou cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.î
–Anon.

ìOften the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.î
–Carl G. Jung

ìDid you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?î
–A. L. Milne (Winnie the Pooh)

ìA man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.î
–Mark Twain

ìA year from now you may wish you had started today.î
–Karen Lamb

ìIt is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.î
–Seneca

ìProgress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.î
–Frederick B. Wilcox

ìGoals are dreams with deadlines.î
–Diana Scharf Hunt

ìBeing busy and being productive are not necessarily related.î
–Brian Koslow

ìWhat you don’t see with your eyes, don’t witness with your mouth.î
–Jewish Proverb

ìBe who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.î
–Dr. Seuss

ìThe one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.î
–H. L. Mencken

ìEnvy is an insult to oneself.î
–Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.”
–Alan Simpson

“You can’t lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself.”
–Gene Mauch

“The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.”
–Anon.

There are people so poor that the only thing
they have is money
–anon

“When we learn to say a deep,
passionate yes to the things that really matter… then peace begins
to settle onto our lives like golden sunlight sifting to a forest floor.”
–Thomas Kinkade

“You gain strength,
courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look
fear in the face.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt

“Sometimes the poorest man leaves his children the richest inheritances.” If her
children inherit her values, anything else is just money.
–Ruth E. Renkel

====
One key here is having similar interests, though the other
very important step is learning exactly what your own likes
and dislikes are. What are the things you must have, and the
things you can’t stand in a dating partner? By learning these
important parts of yourself first, you will make your dating
choices much easier – though many may still be reluctant to
end dating after just two dates, Warren claims that ending a
bad relationship as soon as possible is the best practice.
Just be aware that if you do take a little longer, it will be
harder to end, but sometimes it is important to give that
second chance to someone and Dr. Warren explains when to do
that as well.

What starts out for many of us as an attraction is usually
formed from thousands of influences which are not trustworthy
such as television! Dr. Warren explains how the most
important person for each of us, is someone that is a lot like
us, and that is why he recommends a deep soul-searching
inquiry into your own personality before even thinking of
finding the perfect person.

One of the key items here is to be in touch with yourself,
your energy level and intelligence before thinking about a
significant other. the book features a detailed list of
questions to answer for yourself, then a suggestion to share
this with two or three close friends or family members to make
sure it is right. Spend time thinking of your family and how
you were raised, your personal history in five year segments,
and/or have a detailed psychological inventory done, I
recommend a Myers/Briggs test. When you’ve finished this
part, you’ll know more about who you are then ever before.

The next step is to find out who you are looking for and that
involves two lists, one a list of ‘must-have’ traits, and the
other a list of ‘can’t- stand’ traits. Don’t worry there are
samples that you include in the book, but the hardest part
you’ll find is narrowing these down to 10 items on each list.
After completing this step, you need to learn to ask the right
questions of your dates to determine if they will fit into the
qualities you desire and not fit into the qualities that you
don’t want. Dr. Warren writes that the three characteristics
of emotionally healthy people are 1.) generous, 2.) truthful,
3.) kind, so at least find someone that fits all three of
those!

There is a list of seven similarities that you cannot overlook
such as spiritual harmony, verbal intimacy, energy level,
ambition, role expectations, interests, and personal habits.
To conclude the author lists 29 critical matching variables
that are in place at his own matching website eharmony.com.
There is a fine balance here between knowing who we are,
finding the chemistry between someone, and dating long enough
to know if it’s right, or has future potential.
====

“We are what we repeatedly do.”
— Aristotle

“A friend is someone who knows the song in your
heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

“When you are in the right, You can afford to keep your temper; When you are in the wrong, You can’t afford to lose it.”
–Mahatma Gandhi (wall at Sevagram)

“Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted.
–Hans Margolius.

ìToo many people overvalue what they are not, and undervalue what they are.î –Malcolm Forbes
Shakespeare did not have the makings of a bank president. Mozart could never have been a stockbroker. The gifts they possessed, however, more than made up for their failure to achieve any recognition in the financial profession.
Donít bewail what you cannot do. Focus like a laser beam on the talents you do possess, practice them, refine them, and use them to achieve your own kind of greatness.

“No one gets out of this
world alive, so the time to live, learn, care, share, celebrate, and
love is now.”
– Dr. Leo Buscaglia

“I want to live my life that way — to take it into the world and live
it fully. I’d rather burn out than rust out. I’d rather be used up
than die not having done whatever I could…wherever I would….In the end, I know that my happiness will not have been
about by my ability or my inability. It will have been about my
availability. My life is meant to be lived.”
– Anon

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”
– Anon.

“Keep away from people who try to
belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really
great make you feel that you too, can become great.” Mark Twain

“The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.” — William James

“Your best friend is he who brings out the best that is within you.” Our best friends are those who do more than simply like us. They also believe in us. They support us but, occasionally, they nudge us as well. “A friend is someone who knows you as you are, understands where you’ve been, accepts who you’ve become, and still, gently invites you to grow.” –Anon

Mark Twain gave some advice about discipline. “Do one thing every day
you don’t want to do,” he suggested. It’s a price we pay for success.
Then leave some time to do something you WANT to do, too. The first
gets us where we want to go; the other makes the traveling more fun.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who said,
“What we love we shall grow to resemble.” Or put another way, we
become the spirit and image of that which we hold dear, at least on
the inside.

“Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.” –Madame Marie Curie

Motivator Tony Robbins says, “People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals — that is, goals that do not inspire them.” They don’t accomplish what they set out to do because they lose interest. Their dream, their goal, is really not that important to them.

“There are many things that will catch my eye, but there are only a few that catch my heart…it is those I consider to pursue.” — Tim Redmond

“In your lifetime the most sacred space you will ever
need to create is the space within yourself — the place deep
within your soul where you go to find peace and serenity and to
connect with your true self. It’s the quiet place inside where
you return over and over again that keeps your thoughts sacred,
your heart protected and your dreams alive.”-Nancy SantoPietro

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than
luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not
respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk
gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages,
with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await
occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and
unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.”

“Be contented with what you have, but never too contented with what you are.”

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing,”
–Abraham Lincoln

Educator Leo Buscaglia said, “Too often we underestimate the power of
a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment,
or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn
a life around.” Don’t underestimate what you CAN do! Each of us can do
something, and the something you do may be more important than you’ll
ever know.

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
–Abraham Lincoln

“The future depends on what we do in the present.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
do what lies clearly at hand.”
–Thomas Carlyle

“Trust men and they will be true toyou; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It’s not who you are – but who you want to be that counts.”
–Catriona Carson on CV’s.

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”
— Andrew Carnegie

We all need someone who is reliable. Someone we can trust.
Who can say about you, “I’ll be around through thick or thin. I’ll be here through rain or shine. My commitment to you doesn’t depend on anything you might DO to earn it. You can’t make me care about you more or less one day to the next. At times I may be angry with you or hurt by you or disappointed in you; but I’m still here for you.”
Whom can you count on? And who can count on you?
–Steve Goodier © 2003

“Heroes stand for what is right. If someone is our hero, it’s because that person does what you would like to see accomplished.”
–Kenneth E. Clark

“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”
— John Foster Dulles

“The one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”
— Michael Korda
If you want to achieve more and enhance your credibility with employees and supervisors, approach every assignment with a get-it-done attitude.

“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to
do what lies clearly at hand.”
–Thomas Carlyle

“Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Martin Luther once said, “Everything that is done in the world is
done by the hopeful.”++

COOL CALM AND COLLECTED

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
–Abraham Lincoln

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
–Abraham Lincoln

Ambition
Without ambition one starts nothing.
Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
The man who knows how will always have a job.
The man who also knows why will always be his boss.
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

JOY
“He who binds to himself a joy doth the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
–William Blake

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips it’s turn.”
– Hal Borland

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
~ Barbara Kingsolver ~

Hope is nature’s veil for hiding truth’s nakedness.
~ Alfred Nobel

The secret of the true love of work is the hope of success in that work. It is not for the money reward, for the time spent, or for the skill exercised, but for the successful result in the accomplishment of the work itself.
~ Sidney A. Weltmer ~

If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
~ Moshe Dayan ~

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller

“It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”
-Sir Winston Churchill

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”
– Peter Ustinov

“The measure of a country’s greatness should be based on how well it cares for its most vulnerable populations

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

There is more to life than just increasing its speed.

An eye for an eye and everyone shall be blind

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world

You don’t know who is important to you until you actually lose them

Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.

Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.
”
– M.K. Ghandi

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.”
— Hugh Downs

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
— William James

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
— Thomas Jefferson

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act: it is an attitude.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr

“To persevere is always a reflection of the state of one’s inner life, one’s philosophy and one’s perspective.”
— David Guterson

“Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

Don’t believe all you hear.

When you say, “I love you”, mean it.

When you say, “I’m sorry”, look the person in the eye.

Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

Believe in love at first sight.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

Smile when picking up the phone, the caller will hear it in your voice.

Treat other’s the way you want to be treated!”

“You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”
-Sam Keen

“In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh.”
— Wystan Hugh Auden

‘If we have dark intentions, pain follows us everywhere like a shadow. If our words and actions are pure, happiness clings to us.’
–Buddha.

‘Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday’
–Dale Carnegie.

‘Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom’
–Thomas Jefferson

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
–Oscar Wilde

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now”.

óJ. W. von Goethe

“Truly empowered people never run from anything. Nor do they ever control very much. They operate with quiet faith and deep discrimination. They accept setbacks stoically and they know that, if they just keep pushing on towards the highest goal, there is no doubt that a way to reach it will present itself.”
–Jonathan Cainer 2005

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982)

Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
Shakti Gawain
“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”
– Abraham Lincoln

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
– Sir Francis Bacon

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
– Erica Jong

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
– Mahatma Gandhi

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.”
– Chuck Reid

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
– Mark Twain

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”

“Television allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.”
Bertrand Russell

African happiness is a joint enterprise, something that can only be created by the whole. I am happy because we are happy. Much contentment arises from a sense of family, community, and connectedness.
John Perry Barlow

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
– Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.)

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Krishnamurti

‘Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.’ Venus and Mercury suggest that you are entering the new year with a crucial choice to make. That’s why I have picked out this quote from Buddha. There’s a lot you can talk about, a lot you can explain, a lot you can rationalise and a lot you can argue with. There is, though, one thing you can say that will make you feel a lot better and spread a lot of happiness around your world. Reach for the highest, the wisest and the kindest way to proceed.
– Jonathan Cainer 30 Dec 2005 – Taurus

“Deeds not words are the mark of a man”
-SS.//

“All is well | All can be well”
– SS.//

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
– George Gordon Noel Byron, 1788 – 1824

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
– George Gordon Noel Byron, 1788 – 1824

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882 – 1945

You know you?ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you do something, and it doesn’t work, should you just carry on doing it again and again until it does?
The answer largely depends on what it is that you are doing and whether you can see some way to do it better. Some exercises are completely futile. Always have been, always will be. In other cases, though, persistence really can pay off. Don’t interpret a problem as a reason to give up. It’s actually just a reason to make sure that your next attempt is more carefully thought through.
Jonathan Cainer Wednesday, 1st February 2006 Taurus

“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom”
Thoman Jefferson

>>
3 ways to product value:

1: Operational excellence (offer lower total cost)
2: Product leadership (offer best or most unique product)
3: Customer intimacy (offer a solution that can be best tailored to customers needs)
>>

For every great Hollywood star, there are twenty talented actors ‘resting between engagements’. Why does great success come to some people and not to others? Is it down to luck or skill or how you happen to look? Surely not.
It’s down to determination, faith… and to some extent, to the ability to win friends and influence people
– Jonathan Cainer Wednesday 15 February 2005, Taurus

Patience is the companion of wisdom
– Augustine of Hippo, 354 – 430

Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
– Bob Wells

There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.
-John Steinbeck

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.
– Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533 – 1592

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.
Theodore Seuss Geisel, 1904 – 1991

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
Theodore Seuss Geisel, 1904 – 1991

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.
– Horace Walpole

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe
– Anatole France

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
– Japanese proverb

A man is not honest simply because he never had a chance to steal.
– Yiddish proverb

When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.
– Sufi proverb

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.
– Lebanese proverb

Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces; marriage is also three meals a day, sharing the workload, and remembering to carry out the trash.
– Dr Joyce Brothers

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
– George Levinger

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
– Simone Signoret, 1921 – 1985

“If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”
– Gandhi

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
– Anne Dudley Bradstreet, 1612 – 1672

It is prudent to pour the oil of delicate politeness upon the machinery of friendship.
– Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette, 1873 – 1954

“It’s not necessarily about what you say, but how you say it an come across. The non-verbal cues. You must give people the signals that you are confident, for them to be confident in you. There’s not a right and wrong way, but a confident and unconfident way”
DeepandMeaningless

“I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook up with them later.”
– Mitch Hedberg

“Respect is something invisible, you know when you have it. People are behind you, encouraged by you. There is a hierarchy and you are at the top. When you don’t have it, it’s a battle”
DeepandMeaningless

What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before?
– Henry Miller, 1891 – 1980

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right-about-face which turns us from failure towards success.
– Dorothea Brande

Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he’s talking about.
– Sam Ewing

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
– Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC

Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. It’s your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.
– Laurence Olivier, 1907 – 1989

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil – but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small silly presents every so often – just to save it from drying out completely.
– Pam Brown

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
– Bertrand Russell

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
– Anatole France

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
– Mark Twain

A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.
– Kenneth Tynan

We talk on principle, but we act on interest.
– Walter Savage Landor, 1775 – 1864

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion all in one.
– Eudora Welty, 1909 – 2001

America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.
– All from Arnold Joseph Toynbee, 1889 – 1975

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
-Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation … even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
– HP Lovecraft

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
– Kurt Vonnegut

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
– Bertrand Russell

Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one – as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
– FranÁois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
– Henry Alfred Kissinger

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
– John Michael Crichton

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
-Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.
-Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

You want to travel down a risk-free road? Then pick the one that goes from nowhere – to nowhere else! If, though, you want to get somewhere, you’ve got to do something. Nothing in this world, is without an element of challenge or difficulty. If there’s no possibility of failure, there’s also no possibility of success. You’re conscious now, of a potential drawback to an attractive plan. Remain aware of the cause for concern… but don’t focus too hard on it. If you’re wise and brave, you’ll keep on moving in your chosen direction
-J Cainer Taurus 25th April 2006

My Karma ran over your dogma.
– Unknown

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.
– Aldous Huxley

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.
&
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these: for instance, that where a man can live, there he can also live well.
– Marcus Aurelius, 121 – 180

Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

ìBeauty is the promise of happiness.î
Stendhal quote

In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
– Mark Twain

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
– Abraham Lincoln

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
– Benjamin McLane Spock

In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
-Sigmund Schlomo Freud

Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
-Sigmund Schlomo Freud

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race [is] not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
– Ecclesiastes 9:11

The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all art and science. So to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
– Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
– Greek proverb

Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 – 1941

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
– Robertson Davies

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
– Frank Tibolt

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
– Richard Feynman, 1918 – 1988

The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my eye can catch one-million-year-old light. It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
– Richard Feynman, 1918 – 1988

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
– Helen Keller, 1880 – 1968

Clearly, security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.
– Henry Alfred Kissinger

The more one judges, the less one loves.
– HonorÈ de Balzac, 1799 – 1850

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, and didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
– HonorÈ de Balzac, 1799 – 1850

What is art? Nature concentrated.
– HonorÈ de Balzac, 1799 – 1850

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
– HonorÈ de Balzac, 1799 – 1850

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.
– Cynthia Heimel

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
– David Herbert Lawrence, 1885 – 1930

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, 1863 – 1945

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.
– Stanislaw Lec

To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.
– Sydney Smith, 1771 – 1845

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
– William Butler Yeats, 1865 – 1939

You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things; to compete. You can be just an ordinary person, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals. The intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got, is a very pleasant bonus.
– Edmund Hillary

When you have a talent, you often don’t realise how special it is. To you, it seems natural. You can’t quite believe that everyone else isn’t blessed with the same ability. You forget that others need help to accomplish what comes so easily to you and you also forget that to them, your special gift is of great value. Somewhere in your world now, something is being taken for granted. That’s not a situation that can be allowed to continue. There needs to be respect and recognition.
-Jonathan Cainer – Taurus May 25 2006

Nothing more clearly show how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth, money, position and other worldly goods, than the way he distributes these, and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.
– Jean de La BruyËre, 1645 – 1696

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.
– Chuck Reid

Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space.
– Diana Black

There is no greater challenge than to have someone relying upon you; no greater satisfaction than to vindicate his expectation.
– Kingman Brewster, Jr, 1919 – 1988

Every time I’ve done something that doesn’t feel right, it’s ended up not being right.
– Mario Cuomo

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
– Mario Cuomo

People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: ‘Don’t decide what you don’t have to decide.’ That’s not evasion, it’s wisdom.
– Mario Cuomo

We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.
– Mario Cuomo

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
– Mario Cuomo

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
– Mark Twain, 1835 – 1910

No matter how hot she is, someone, somewhere is sick of her shit.
Anon

We’re all on the same side. Everyone.
We all have the same goal. We all just want happiness.
There isn’t any need to fuss about it.
Just recognize that my happiness depends on your happiness, vice-versa, and et cetera.
No one can really be happy with themselves unless they feel free to be themselves.
Anon

These are the prerogatives of genius: to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.
-Ambrose Bierce

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
-Ambrose Bierce

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
– Ambrose Bierce

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.
– Cullen Hightower

The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it – once you can honestly say, “I don’t know,” then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
-Robert Anson Heinlein, 1907 – 1988

To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.
-Robert Anson Heinlein, 1907 – 1988

$100 invested at 7% interest for 100 years will become $100,000, at which time it will be worth absolutely nothing.
– All from Robert Anson Heinlein, 1907 – 1988

There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.
-Edgar Degas

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see.
– Edgar Degas, 1834 – 1917

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.
– All from George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950

Living hell is the best revenge.
– Adrienne E. Gusoff

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
– Immanuel Kant, 1724 – 1804

“Seven Blunders of the World”

1. Wealth without work

2. Pleasure without conscience

3. Knowledge without character

4. Commerce without morality

5. Science without humanity

6. Worship without sacrifice

7. Politics without principle

óMahatma Gandhi

All that is gold does not glitter;
not all those that wander are lost.
– John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
– Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

The best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
– Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC

A Dream is woven from thin air and nothing, Embroidered with wishes and everything, Then filled with the padding of hope and delight.
– James W. King

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. (Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948)

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.
– Floyd Dell

I’m not judging people, I’m judging their actions. It’s the same type of distinction that I try to apply to myself, to judge, but not be judgmental.
– Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Crime and Punishment, 1992

If you have life, you have everything. As long, that is, as you appreciate what a gift life is. Some people focus only on their woes and worries, their fears and fancies, their regrets and resentments. They feel no profound, simple gratitude for existence itself. For them, everything is hollow. First, seek meaning. Recognise how blessed you are, just to be here. Then, seek direction. Look at what’s most likely to bring inspiration. And relax. That seemingly urgent drama is just a passing distraction.
– Jonathan Cainer, Taurus 29th August 2006

When the student is ready. . . the lesson appears.
– Gene Oliver

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.
– Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1899 – 1977

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
– William G. McAdoo

Education sows not seeds in you, but makes your seeds grow.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
– Sydney J. Harris, 1917 – 1986

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don’t improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don’t buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don’t test more; develop better.
– Steve McConnell Code Complete

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
– Bertrand Russell

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
– Albert Einstein

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
– H L Mencken

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
– Napoleon Bonaparte

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
– Dwight Eisenhower

Style distinguishes excellence from accomplishment.
– James Coplien

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Robert A. Heinlein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
– Albert Einstein

When you learn to trust your emotions instead of manipulating them, you will experience true love.
– Lucy Alexis Smith

Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.
– William Arthur Ward, 1921 – 1994

Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept.
– Carl Lotus Becker

You are the same today that you are going to be in five years from now except for two things: the people with whom you associate and the books you read.
– Charles Jones

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
– Franz Kafka, 1883 – 1924

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
– James Bryce, 1838 – 1922

The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth.
– Dan Rather

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
– Patricia Neal

Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb.
– William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811 – 1863

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
– Gustave Flaubert, 1821 – 1880

The best form of defense is attack.
– Karl von Clausewitz, 1780 – 1831

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.
James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 – 1851

People who take time to be alone usually have depth, originality, and quiet reserve.
– John Miller

If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try to be right.
– Jules Renard, 1864 – 1910

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit, and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.
– Brian Dyson

Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship – never.
– Charles Caleb Colton

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before. To test your limits. To break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
– AnaÔs Nin, 1903 – 1977

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
– Anne Sullivan

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
– Clive Staples Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
– M. Kathleen Casey

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.
– Benjamin Franklin, 1706 – 1790

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.
– Charles Scribner, Jr.

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 Gustav Jung, 1875 – 1961

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
– Anais Nin

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
– Amelia Earhart

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

Before you embark on any path ask the question, does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it and then you must choose another path. The trouble is that nobody asks the question. And when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart the path is ready to kill him.
– Carlos Castaneda

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
– Kahlil Gibran

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
– Dale Carnegie

“The art of being yourself at your best is the art of unfolding your personality into the person you want to be… Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others.”
– Wilfred Peterson

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.”
– Og Mandino

“One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
-Daniel Joseph Boorstin, 1914 – 2004

A sign of a celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
-Daniel Joseph Boorstin, 1914 – 2004

Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
– Ezra Loomis Pound, 1885 – 1972

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.
– Kenko Yoshida, 1283 – 1352

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.
– Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx, 1890 – 1977

Courage is not the towering oak
That sees storms come and go;
It is the fragile blossom
That opens in the snow.
– Alice Mackenzie Swaim

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
-T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965

The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
-T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
-T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965

Radio is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
– All from T. S. Eliot, 1888 – 1965

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.
– Gamal Abdel Nasser

“Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.” Better, he went on, to “explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity.”
Ray Ozzie

“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate”, which is translated as “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something.
– Occam’s Razor William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).

Like water which can clearly mirror the sky and the trees only so long as its surface is undisturbed, the mind can only reflect the true image of the Self when it is tranquil and wholly relaxed.
– Indra Devi

The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.
– Sydney J. Harris, 1917 – 1986

It might not be marriage itself that you fear, but marriage to this person. A good nugget of wisdom to remember is that you shouldn’t marry the person you know you can live with for the rest of your life; marry the one whom you can’t imagine yourself living without. –
anon

Generally, our behaviour is most questionable when we are pursuing a policy that we consider to be right beyond all question.
-Jonathan Cainer 19/10/2006

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896 – 1940

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 1694 – 1773

Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.
– Andrew Jackson, 1767 – 1845

Lost time is like a run in a stocking. It always gets worse.
– Ann Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
– Carl Sandburg, 1878 – 1967

Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
– Augustine of Hippo, 354 – 430

The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at a time.
– Sydney Smiles

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.
– Theodore Roosevelt, 1858 – 1919

If fear alters behavior, you’re already defeated.
– Brenda Hammond

Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
– Brendan Francis

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
– Eric Hoffer, 1902 – 1983

He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.
– Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533 – 1592

To fight fear, act. To increase fear – wait, put off, postpone.
– David Joseph Schwartz

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.
– Miles Davis, 1926 – 1991

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.
– Galileo Galilei, 1564 – 1642

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Before God we are equally wise – and equally foolish.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.
– Harry S Truman, 1884 – 1972

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
– Charles Krauthammer

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
– Henry Van Dyke, 1852 – 1933

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Soren Kierkegaard – Danish philosopher (1813 – 1855)

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.
– Kahlil Gibran

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
– Ayn Rand, 1905 – 1982

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
-Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
-Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three – and paradise is when you have none.
– Doug Larson

The golden rule when reading the menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it.
– Frank Muir, 1920 – 1998

Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways.
– Edward de Bono

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

He who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.
– Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712 – 1778

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget. But they have no slow, big ideas.
– Brenda Ueland, 1891 – 1985

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.
– Chinese proverb

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has “The Truth”. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
– Tom Lehrer

I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.
– Tom Lehrer

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
– Aldous Leonard Huxley, 1894 – 1963

“I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”
– Jean Kerr

When people feel vulnerable, they put up barriers. They try to hide their own softness by feigning strength. This only increases their vulnerability! When we try to be tough, we become brittle. When we deny the truth to others, we also tend to deny it from ourselves. Then, we grow confused. For, if we cannot call upon the most sensitive side of our own nature, we cannot access the wisdom we need. It’s not an item, a resource or a facility that you require now, it’s just an insight! Wednesday, 25th April 2007, Taurus
– Jonathan Cainer

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
– Adam Smith, 1723 – 1790

Hope is like a road in the country; there never was a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
– Lin Yutang

The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one. Nay, it is obvious that the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
– FranÁois Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694 – 1778

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made; Our times are in his hand who saith, A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: See all, nor be afraid!
– Robert Browning 1812- 1889

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
– All from Robert Browning, 1812 – 1889

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
-S¯ren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
-S¯ren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.
-S¯ren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
-S¯ren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
– Aldous Leonard Huxley, 1894 – 1963

When the best student hears about the way
He practices it assiduously;
When the average student hears about the way
It seems to him one moment there and gone the next;
When the worst student hears about the way
He laughs out loud.
If he did not laugh
It would be unworthy of being the way.

Hence the Chien yen has it:
The way that is bright seems dull;
The way that leads forward seems to lead backward;
The way that is even seems rough.
The highest virtue is like the valley;
The sheerest whiteness seems sullied;
Ample virtue seems defective;
Vigorous virtue seems indolent;
Plain virtue seems soiled;
The great square has no corners.
The great vessel takes long to complete;
The great note is rarefied in sound;
The great image has no shape.

The way conceals itself in being nameless.
It is the way alone that excels in bestowing and in accomplishing.
-Chapter 41 of the Tao Te Ching

Wit is the lightning of the mind, reason the sunshine, and reflection the moonlight.
– Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, 1789 – 1849

Tact is the ability to make a person see lightning without letting him feel the bolt.
– Orlando A. Battista

Fear is not a disease of the body; fear kills the soul.
ñ Mahatma Gandhi

To forgive and accept injustice is cowardice.
ñ Mahatma Gandhi

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” –Stanley Kubrick

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
-Hubert H. Humphrey, 1911 – 1978

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.
-Hubert H. Humphrey, 1911 – 1978

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917 – 1963

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917 – 1963

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
– William Butler Yeats, 1865 – 1939

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman, 1819 – 1892

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
-Walt Whitman, 1819 – 1892

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
– Benjamin Disraeli, 1804 – 1881

A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
– Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.
– Elbert Hubbard, 1856 – 1915

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.
– Seneca

No mind is much employed upon the present: Recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.
– Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784

Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.
– Regina Nadelson

Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.
– Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, 1870 – 1966

If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.
– Jonathan Winters

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.
– Norman Juster

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.
– Ann Landers, 1918 – 2002

“If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.”
– Mo Udall

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”
– James Thurber

To continually subject yourself to neglect, abuse, apathy or conflict is not being loving to yourself. If you are not loving to yourself, how can you expect anyone else to be?
– India Times, spirituality, Conscious relationships | http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1922008,curpg-1.cms

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
– Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC

Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
– Epictetus

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don’t add up.
– James Magary

Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
– Agatha Christie, 1890 – 1976

Whenever people say we mustn’t be sentimental, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, we must be realistic, they mean they are going to make money out of it.
– Brigid Antonia Brophy

You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy, because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.
– Jean Kerr, 1923 – 2003

It’s bad luck to be superstitious.
– Andrew W. Mathis

People naturally fear misfortune and long for good fortune, but if the distinction is carefully studied, misfortune often turns out to be good fortune and good fortune to be misfortune. The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure.
– Siddhartha Gautama, 563 – 483 BC

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
– William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

Try this cocktail: humanity, humility, wit, generosity and above all, gratitude – our most direct line to God and the angels
– J J Valaya (http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2206730.cms

“The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.”
Sophocles

You really don’t have to put up with something that you are becoming resigned to. You simply need to ask for help. That requires you to be brave, humble and defiant of your own fear of rejection. If you find that faith, you’ll get your reward
– Cainer Taurus (Sat 28 July 2007, week ahead)

The difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person, between a successful business and an unsuccessful business, is not in the lack of ideas or opportunities, but in the lack of timely action.
-anon

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.
– Lilli Palmer

“I try to remind myself to stop running from my insecurities and fears, to see them for what they are (illusions), and to have faith in what is. The Buddhists call it returning to the moment. The Christianís call it trusting in Godís will. The shrinks might call it getting rid of anxiety. The Tao te Ching just says that a man who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”
-Will Chen

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height; In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 – 1941

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
– Mahatma Gandhi

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a 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

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
– Mahatma Gandhi

“A very high percentage of negative events are related to the feeling that someone else doesn’t value a relationship as much as you do,” says Duke University psychologist Mark Leary. Those are the sore feelings that accompany such thoughts as, “Why did my coworker brush me off in that meeting?” or “My husband is watching TV when he should be paying attention to me!”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20070622-000001.html

Shame often manifests itself as anger
– Anon

The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.
– Bill Murray in Lost in Translation

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
– Claude-Adrien Helvetius, 1715 – 1771

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
– Oscar Wilde, 1854 – 1900

A very large amount of human suffering and frustration is caused by the fact that many men and women are not content to be the sort of beings that God has made them, but try to persuade themselves that they are really beings of some different kind.
– Eric Mascall

Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he’s talking about.
– Sam Ewing

Persons who insist to themselves that under one set of conditions only can they lead interesting and satisfying lives lay themselves open to bitter disappointments and frustrations.
– Hortense Odlum, 1881 – 1970

When one’s own problems are unsolvable and all best efforts frustrated, it is lifesaving to listen to other people’s problems.
– Suzanne Massie

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
– John Kenneth Galbraith

Only intuition can protect you from the most dangerous individual of all, the articulate incompetent.
– Robert Bernstein

“in the long run, people most often regret the things they failed to try, rather than the things they bombed at. Trying yields either success or an opportunity to learn; not trying has no positive result besides avoiding mockery or envy that (research shows) wouldn’t be nearly as big or bad as we fear.

You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890 – 1969

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
– AnaÔs Nin, 1903 – 1977

Everyone’s got it in him, if he’ll only make up his mind and stick at it. None of us is born with a stop-valve on his powers or with a set limit to his capacities, There’s no limit possible to the expansion of each one of us.
– Charles M. Schwab, 1862 – 1939

Life is not advancement. It is growth. It does not move upward, but expands outward, in all directions.
– Russell G. Alexander

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
– Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884 – 1962

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
– Eliezer Wiesel

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.
– Confucius

Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.
– Confucius

To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage
– Confucius

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.
– Confucius

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
– Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1865

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
– George F. Burns, 1896 – 1996

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
– George Orwell, 1903 – 1950

The supreme irony of business management is that it is far easier for an inadequate CEO to keep his job than it is for an inadequate subordinate…. At too many companies, the boss shoots the arrow of managerial performance and then hastily paints the bullseye around the spot where it lands.
– Warren Buffett

The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
– Laurence J. Peter

Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.
– V·clav Havel

No people ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.
– Theodore Roosevelt, 1858 – 1919

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
– Oscar Wilde, 1854 – 1900

To be a genuine individualist requires a great deal of strength and courage. It is never easy to chart new territory, to cross new frontiers, or to introduce subtle shadings to an established color.
– Toller Cranston
I am not a glutton – I am an explorer of food.
– Erma Louise Bombeck, 1927 – 1996

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
– Arthur Koestler, 1905 – 1983

There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
-anon

Too Much Information
Think withholding your true emotions will doom your relationship? A study shows that socially anxious people can actually improve romantic closeness by putting a lid on their reactions, which often take the form of hostility or withdrawal. For the more self-assured, it’s better to open up, which heightens intimacy.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20070515-000002.html

The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.
– E. Joseph Cossman

He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.
– Thomas Fuller, 1608 – 1661

If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.
– Paul Newman

It seems to be a law of our own minds that we find the art forms of our fathers hideous, the art forms of our grandfathers amusing and those our great-grandfathers attractive and even beautiful.
– James Laver, 1899 – 1975

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
– Lewis Mumford, 1895 – 1990

If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
– All from Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856 – 1941

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
– FranÁois Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694 – 1778

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
– FranÁois Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694 – 1778

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority was derived, and treats him accordingly.
– Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
– Thomas Paine, 1737 – 1809

What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds except those of one’s own being, control’d by the universal ones.
– Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871

Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.
– Arabic Proverb

What can be done at any time is never done at all.
– English Proverb

One meets one’s destiny often in the road one takes to avoid it.
– French proverb

By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn.
– Latin proverb

The morning is wiser than the evening.
– Russian proverb

More things grow in the garden than the gardener sows.
– Spanish proverb

I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.
– Sufi proverb

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.
– Swedish proverb

Reason is the wise man’s guide, example the fool’s.
– Welsh proverb

God gave burdens, also shoulders.
– Yiddish proverb

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.
– Sicilian proverb

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
– Woody Allen

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
– Mark Twain, 1835 – 1910

If you tell the truth you don’t have anything to remember.
– Mark Twain, 1835 – 1910

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
– Mark Twain, 1835 – 1910

ìIíve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasnít it.î
ñGroucho Marx

ìI feel so miserable without you; itís almost like having you here.î
ñStephen Bishop

ìHe is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.î
ñSamuel Johnson

“There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.”
óJack E. Leonard

ìSome cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.î
ñOscar Wilde

We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. And yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1906 – 2001

The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
– Confucius

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
– Marshall McLuhan, 1911 – 1980

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
– Thomas Carlyle, 1795 – 1881

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
– E.E. Cummings

Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom.
– Cliff Stoll & Gary Schubert

I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful
– Warren Buffet

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose the ventures before us
– William Shakespeare

Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory
– Mahatma Gandhi,

It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
– Henry James, 1843 – 1916

A year from now you may wish you had started today.
– Karen Lamb

Celebrate what you want to see more of.
– Tom Peters

I’m the type who’d be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn’t going to. I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.
– Andy Warhol, 1928 – 1987

After all, what is your hosts’ purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they’d have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
– P. J. O’Rourke

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.
– William Ewart Gladstone, 1809 – 1898

We look forward to the time when the power to love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
– William Ewart Gladstone, 1809 – 1898

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won’t have to hunt for happiness.
– William Ewart Gladstone, 1809 – 1898

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
– William Ewart Gladstone, 1809 – 1898

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.
– William Ewart Gladstone, 1809 – 1898

A king, realizing his incompetence, can either delegate or abdicate his duties. A father can do neither. If only sons could see the paradox, they would understand the dilemma.
– Marlene Dietrich, 1901 – 1992

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
– Marlene Dietrich, 1901 – 1992

Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect.
– Oren Arnold

Go in search of your Gift. The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world.
– Brida

When you get to the end of all the light you know and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.
– Edward Teller, 1908 – 2003

Begin today! No matter how feeble the light, let it shine as best it may. The world may need just that quality of light which you have.
– Henry C. Blinn

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
– Maya Angelou

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811 – 1896

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
– William Arthur Ward, 1921 – 1994

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
– Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains it original dimension.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, 1809 – 1894

The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, 1809 – 1894

Man has his will – but woman has her way.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, 1809 – 1894

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910

In saying that without the power of the state, evil men would rule over the good it is taken for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are now subjugated.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
– George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.
– George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
– Arthur Somers Roche

The happiest people I know are the ones who have learned how to hold everything loosely and have given the worrisome, stress-filled, fearful details of their lives into God’s keeping.
– Charles R. Swindoll

In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
– Lido Anthony Iacocca

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
– Antoine de Saint-ExupÈry, 1900 – 1944

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
– Bertrand Russell, 1872 – 1970

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
– David Russell

People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.
– Joseph F. Newton

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-Albert Einstein

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
-Albert Einstein

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
– Fredrick Nietzsche

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
– Fredrick Nietzsche

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
– Fredrick Nietzsche

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
-voltaire

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
-voltaire

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
-voltaire

The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.
-voltaire

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
-voltaire

There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.
-voltaire

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
-voltaire

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.
-voltaire

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
-voltaire

Courage is knowing what not to fear.
-Plato

The measure of a man is what he does with power.
-Plato

If you are going through hell, keep going.
-Winston Churchill

What year did Jesus think it was?
-George Carlin

Thereís a phrase we live by in America: ìIn God We Trustî. Itís right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.
-Stephen Colbert

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the Americaís Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesnít want to
go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ëBushí, ëDickí, and ëColon.í Need I say more?
– Chris Rock

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough
– Mario Andretti

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
– Unknown

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
– John W. Gardner, 1912 – 2002

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
-Virginia Woolf, 1882 – 1941

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion – the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.
– Virginia Woolf, 1882 – 1941

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.
– Confucius, c.551 – 479 BC

Aggression is almost invariably, a sign of fear. When people feel that they are under threat they have two choices. Fight or flight. We have to feel truly terrified before running away becomes an attractive option. If we are just a little anxious or apprehensive, we will adopt an attitude.
– Jonathan Cainer 30/01/2008

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
– AnaÔs Nin, 1903 – 1977

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.
– Jawaharlal Nehru, 1889 – 1964

It’s better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at length and be right too late.
– Marilyn Moats Kennedy

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
– Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides), 1135 – 1204

Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
– Daniel Webster, 1782 – 1852

Every great leap forward in your life comes after you have made a clear decision of some kind.
– Brian Tracy

Sometimes you just have to take the leap and build your wings on the way down.
– Kobi Yamada

It seems to me that the coming of love is like the coming of spring – the date is not to be reckoned by the calendar.
– Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1803 – 1873

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 – 1941

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.
– Robert Brault

The ritual of marriage is not simply a social event; it is a crossing of threads in the fabric of fate. Many strands bring the couple and their families together and spin their lives into a fabric that is woven on their children.
– Portuguese-Jewish Wedding Ceremony

Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.
– Henri Estienne, 1528 – 1598

What is a thousand years? Time is short for one who thinks, endless for one who yearns.
– Alain (…mile-Auguste Chartier), 1868 – 1951

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually, it loiters; but just when one has come to count on its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild, irrational gallop.
– Edith Wharton, 1862 – 1937

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
– George Jean Nathan

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
– Andre Gide

Technology on its own will transform nothing. Without human-designed and managed processes that focus on harnessing the technology, no improvements in efficiency and productivity can be made.
– Gerry McGovern

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
– John Burroughs

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.
– Eric Idle

Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.
– Whoopi Goldberg

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
– Virginia Woolf, 1882 – 1941

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
– Gloria Steinem

What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.
– Bruce Barton, 1886 – 1967

The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.
– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1869 – 1948

The willingness to sacrifice is the prelude to freedom.
– The Pesach Seder

Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still.
– Deng Ming-Dao

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation … even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
– Leonardo da Vinci, 1452 – 1519

Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.
– Patch Adams

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
– William Blake, 1757 – 1827

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
– Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 – 2008
Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
– Josh Billings, 1818 – 1885

Quit while you’re ahead. All the best gamblers do.
– Baltasar Gracian, 1601 – 1656

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part.
– Washington Irving, 1783 – 1859

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
– Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
– J. William Fulbright, 1905 – 1995

In the long course of history, having people understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.
– J. William Fulbright, 1905 – 1995

I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion honestly expressed by honest men.
– J. William Fulbright, 1905 – 1995

There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable.
– J. William Fulbright, 1905 – 1995

We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
– J. William Fulbright, 1905 – 1995

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
– Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments; then the wind blows your footprints away.
– Arlene Blum

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
– Arthur Golden

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us; but it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
– Marie Louise de la RamÈe (Ouida), 1839 – 1908

Blossoms are scattered by the wind and the wind cares nothing, but the blossoms of the heart no wind can touch.
– Yoshida Kenko

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
– Willa Silbert Cather, 1873 – 1947

We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
– Albert Camus, 1913 – 1960

I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.
– Hildebrand of Soana, 1020 – 1085 (Gregory VII)

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one’s family and affairs.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1762 – 1826

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
– Cyril Connolly, 1903 – 1974

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1743 – 1826

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
– Arthur Miller, 1915 – 2005

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
– Oscar Wilde, 1854 – 1900

All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.
– Jim Fiebig

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure.
– Mark Skousen

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.
– Herbert Clark Hoover, 1874 – 1964

We think too much and feel too little.
– Charlie Chaplin, 1889 – 1977

To be lonely is a state of mind, something completely other than physical solitude; when modern authors rant about the soulís intolerable loneliness, it is only proof of their own intolerable emptiness.
– Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen, 1885 – 1962

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself.
– Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen, 1885 – 1962

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
– Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen, 1885 – 1962

None of us ever gets everything we wanted or needed in childhood. You can either let the rest of your life be defined by that lack or you can use that experience as a guide to what you need to do for yourself in life. I highly recommend the latter.
We are not required to be jerks just because other people were (are) jerks to us. You are in your late 50s. Are you going to let other people, such as your mother, determine how you behave in this world, or are you going to decide for yourself what is the best way to act toward others? What way is congruent with your beliefs and values and goals?
Either way, you’re an adult and it’s time that you decided how you want to be and how you want to treat others. It may or may not be possible to be emotionally close to your mother. Some people resist closeness and your mother may be one of them. But even that is not a barrier to how you treat her and how much time and attention you decide to give her. You don’t have to be emotionally intimate to have a satisfying relationship for you both, even for different reasons. You may choose to give her some companionship and support because that reflects the compassionate and generous person you are. She may welcome the companionship because it relieves loneliness or boredom.
-Hara Estroff Marano Psychology Today 04/2008

You cannot be mad at somebody who makes you laugh – it’s as simple as that.
– Jay Leno

I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good. Maybe you’re not the best, so you should work a little harder.
– Jay Leno

Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren’t bad people; they’re just acquaintances.
– Jay Leno

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
– Christopher Morley, 1890 – 1957

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
– Christopher Morley, 1890 – 1957

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

People who cannot feel punish those who do.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
– Eleonora Duse

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
– George Santayana, 1863 – 1952

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.
– Jacob Bronowski, 1908 – 1974

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
– Karl Augustus Menninger, 1893 – 1990

The forgiving state of mind is a magnetic power for attracting good.
– Catherine Ponder

Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.
– Garrison Keillor

Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren’t bad people; they’re just acquaintances.
– Jay Leno

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
– David Hume, 1711 – 1776

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
– David Hume, 1711 – 1776

The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
– Franklin P. Adams, 1881 – 1960

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
– King Lear, William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
– Charlotte BrontÎ, 1816 – 1855

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
– Charlotte BrontÎ, 1816 – 1855

History is a vast early warning system.
– Norman Cousins, 1915 – 1990

Conscience warns us as a friend before it punishes as a judge.
– Stanislaus Leszczynski, 1677 – 1766

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
– Anais Nin

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
– Alice James

Buchheit’s Law: “Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization”

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
– Bertrand Russell

Sunday, 17th August 2008
TAURUS
Your Week Ahead: Even when we know what we want, we can’t be sure that we know why we want it. We don’t just hide our true motives from other people; we hide them from ourselves. We tell ourselves whatever we think we want to hear. We create arguments that sound persuasive and then we ask no further questions. You are not sure how seriously to take a certain suggestion now.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
– Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1830 – 1916

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a digital readout blinks us towards implosion.
– Dean Koontz

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

True guidance I mean information that is:

Never judgmental
Insightful
Consistent without being a ‘should’
Supportive
Wise (from a mature voice)
Comes from a place of abundance
Encourages me to experience joy now rather than delay it for later.

Versus false guidance:
Lots of shoulds
Judgmental
Fear-based
Ego-centric
Advises delayed happiness
– Bella Shing

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
– Seneca the Younger

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
– Anonymous

On the first day, man created God.
– Anonymous

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
– Bertrand Russell

– if you really want a happy love life, the real secret is to love life. When you do that, everyone wants to know you. And when life seems too difficult, stressful or worrying… well, somehow, folk sense this and react badly.
Sunday, 21st September 2008 Jonathan Cainer 2008

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
– Peter Drucker, 1909 – 2005

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
– Margaret Thatcher

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.
– Margaret Thatcher

“You can sell gold at the price of silver, but is there a market?”
Gulam Noon

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
François Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694 – 1778

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.
– Charles Caleb Colton, 1780 – 1832

Life’s simplest things are love, and kindly friends, Nature’s sweet charm of earth and sea and sky; gladness of soul that with right living blends – home’s dear content, so cheap that all may buy.
– Ripley D. Saunders

focus on what activities you like to do and develop that realm of your life. When you feel good about what you do you will feel good about who you are. “That is a great foundation from which to enter into a relationship.”
– Eharmony advice

Today’s egg is better than tomorrow’s hen.
– Turkish proverb

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage… to listen to his own goodness.
– Pablo Casals, 1876 – 1973

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
– Pablo Casals, 1876 – 1973

Beauty is all about us, but how may are blind! They look at the wonder of this earth and seem to see nothing. People move hectically but give little thought to where they are going. They seek excitement … as if they were lost and desperate.
– Pablo Casals, 1876 – 1973

Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?
– Pablo Casals, 1876 – 1973

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.
All from Pablo Casals, 1876 – 1973

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
– Demosthenes

If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749 – 1832

Begin somewhere; you cannot build a reputation on what you intend to do.
– James Russell Lowell, 1819 – 1891

There is a woman at the begining of all great things.
– Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine, 1790 – 1869

Before beginning a Hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it.
– Alan Alexander Milne, 1882 – 1956

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.
– George Baker, 1877 – 1965

In everything one must consider the end.
– Jean de La Fontaine, 1621 – 1695

Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind … the race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.
– Mary Schmich

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
– Richard Bach

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
– Orson Welles, 1915 – 1985

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
– Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 – 1860

Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it.
– Tim Ferris

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
– Victor Borge, 1909 – 2000

Humor [is] something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
– Victor Borge, 1909 – 2000

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
– Isaac Newton

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.
– Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Our tendency to create heroes rarely jibes with the reality that most nontrivial problems require collective solutions.
– Warren G. Bennis

As I look back upon my life, I see that every part of it was a preparation for the next. The most trivial of incidents fits into the larger pattern like a mosaic in a preconceived design.
– Margaret Sanger, 1879 – 1966

Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.
– Mary Worley Montagu

I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.
– Thornton Niven Wilder, 1897 – 1975

Similar to intimacy, anger stems from feeling emotionally vulnerable, but this time unsafe at the same time. It starts with miscommunication and subsequent misunderstandings, then as patterns begin to develop, communication decreases, and resentments begin to accumulate. These resentments will reach a kind of critical mass and destructive anger emerges.
Anger is an individual, defensive, and, at times, destructive dynamic that plays itself out by hurting the ones I love. My anger protects me from you by creating distance between us.
Robert Whitman
http://www.divinecaroline.com/user/profile/121186

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
Salvador Dali, 1904 – 1989

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We live together as rational human beings or die together as fools.
All from Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
– Hippocrates

Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing…. Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not.
– Lao Tze

The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.
– Lloyd Jones

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
– Olin Miller

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
– Umberto Eco

The way to be free and happy is not achieved by acquiring anything outside of our selves, or by developing this quality or that quality. Nor is it achieved by trying to be a special type of person, or being a good person, but by looking at the story of who we think we are. We are free when we stop believing and identifying with the image we have of ourselves in our own heads. It is through meditation that we see and eventually frr ourselves from this image.

Freedom is for everybody, not just for the select few. We don’t need to live in a special place, we don’t need to don special clothes or recite sacred words in sacred places. It is available for each and every one of us, if we are willing to look at our selves with honesty and with courage.

http://www.happy-buddha.co.uk/
Suryachitta

Sundeep’s Uncertainty Principle: It’s the not knowing that’s the killer…

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.
Abraham Lincoln

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
Abraham Lincoln

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.
Abraham Lincoln

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
Abraham Lincoln

You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln

‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln, (attributed)

You love yourself more by being kind to yourself, flaws and all. to know that the journey is long and we learn as we go along. there is no rush, no right or wrong way to be. you love yourself by being gentle on yourself. that’s my two pence worth.
– A-Anon Friend.

“self-knowledge is less a matter of careful introspection than of becoming an excellent observer of oneself.”
Wilson suggests some ways that can help us learn more about ourselves, such as really attempting to be objective when considering our behaviors and trying to see ourselves through the eyes of other people.
– psychologist Timothy D. Wilson from the University of Virginia

The Ideal and Not So Ideal

Interactions in an ideal and healthy relationship:

1. Nondefensiveness and openness

2. Honesty and integrity

3. Respect for the other’s boundaries, priorities and goals, separate from self

4. Physical affection and responsive sexuality

5. Understanding–lack of distortion of the other

6. Noncontrolling, nonmanipulative and nonthreatening behavior

(Source: Fear of Intimacy, 1999)

Interactions in an unhealthy relationship:

1. Angry and negative reactions to feedback; being closed to new experiences

2. Deception and duplicity

3. Overstepping boundaries–other seen only in relation to self

4. Lack of affection, inadequate or impersonal, routine sexuality

5. Misunderstanding–distortion of the other

6. Manipulations of dominance and submission

(Source: Fear of Intimacy, 1999; The Glendon Association)

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

“Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”
– Anon

Freud suggested several defense mechanisms including: Denial (Defense mechanisms don’t exist!) Displacement – (People who believe in defense mechanisms made me look silly, so now I’m going to abuse my wife) Intellectualization (The online discussion of defense mechanisms was an interesting experience) Projection (I’m not deluded about Defense Mechanisms, YOU ARE!), Rationalization (I’m right that defense mechanisms don’t exist, because I am popular and have good grades) Reaction Formation (Why, I love discussing defense mechanisms with you online, I don’t feel beat down or angry at all!) Regression (Mommy mommy! It hurts! Take care of me!) Repression (I don’t like to talk about it.) Sublimation (I’m going to exercise/work/whatever instead of beating you up.)
– Reddit antimatter_16

“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”
– Matt Groening

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

A witty saying proves nothing.
— Voltaire

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every ,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
– Carl Sagan

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
– Mark Twain

“A thousand candles may be lit by a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – – Buddha

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
– Bertrand Russell

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
– Peter Drucker

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship.
Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment,
it will not be created for years or even generations.” Khalil Gibran

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” Albert Enstein

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities,
But to know someone who thinks and feels with us,
And who, though distant, is close to us in spirit,
This makes the earth for us, an inhabited garden.” Goethe

A mind that has been stretched will never return to it’s original dimension.” Albert Einstein

“Friendship with the upright, with the truthful and with the well informed is beneficial. Friendship with those who flatter, with those who are meek and who compromise with principles, and with those who talk cleverly is harmful.” Confucius

“To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.”
– Stephen R Covey

The first proof of a well-ordered mind is to be able to pause and linger within itself.
– Seneca

Little minds are wounded by the smallest things.
– La Rochefoucauld

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein

When technology delivers basic needs, user experiences dominates
– Dan Norman

“Pain is the awareness of life”
-Anon

“Wherever you go, there you are…”
– Anon

It’s not momentum that you need, it’s direction. Go for purpose not passion, strategy not strength. Save a full force attack until you have exhausted gentler possibilities
– Jonathan Cainer, Taurus, Monday, 31 August 2009

People have different “love languages,” she explains. For some people, touch makes them feel loved; for others it’s meaningful conversations, or how much time you spend together. “But if you’re married to someone whose love language is touch, you can buy them expensive gifts or take them on vacations or say I love you until the cows come home, but it won’t matter because it won’t mean love,” says Weiner Davis. “In good relationships, partners try to figure out each other’s love language and speak it—even if it’s different from their own. Good relationships are built on mutual caretaking.”
– Michelle Weiner-Davis

We’re attracted to someone when we like the way we look in their eyes. We’re most attracted to those who see us as we want to be seen, who allow us room to stretch—to be, or become, our best self.
—Hara Estroff Marano

Playing hard to get works because it increases a person’s perceived value. “It’s simple sexual economics,” explains Peter Jonason, a researcher at New Mexico State University. “You give the impression of lower availability, increasing demand.” But hard-to-get is a dangerous game. We like people who like us back, and if you seem too unattainable, you risk causing the other person to give up. In sum: Stretching out that period of anxious anticipation can be a powerful weapon of courtship. Use with caution.
—Jay Dixit

This may suggest that our thoughts, when we notice them, are provisional and that we do not have to engage with them at the level of content. In mindfulness practice, watching thoughts arise, rest and move through the mind allows a similar awareness of thinking as something that can be observed and does not have to be engaged with. Recognizing that we can choose to step out of unhelpful automatic and habitual thought patterns, helps reduce our reactivity and allows us to deal more skillfully with challenges in our lives.
– Zindel Segal

Use your money to buy experiences, not objects
– Anon from Reddit

Live your life as if you were a 69 year old man with Alzheimer’s and a pet turtle no one has the heart to tell you is dead.
– Anon from Reddit

You will love numerous girls before you get married. Each girl will be “the one.” They won’t. The girl you marry will be the girl you love when you are ready to get married. In other words, when you’re ready to get married, you’ll know it. And if you have any doubts, don’t.
– Anon from Reddit

Turn off the computer and be around people. A thousand instant messages will never equal a night watching the stars and talking about life with someone you care about.
-Anon from Reddit

“All women are crazy. The key is to find one that knows she’s crazy.”
– Anon from Reddit

Try not to worry about things in life. Normally everything turns out ok whatever you do.
-Anon from Reddit

Learn and study the rules of logic. Internalize them. Become aware of your own thinking, and your own biases.

Worry when its productive. If worry makes you get up and do something about the problem, worry all you want. As soon as worry stops pushing you in the direction of productivity, stop worrying.

Feel guilt or sadness when its useful. If these feelings enforce a lesson that says “Don’t do that again” then absorb it. Say “this pain teaches me something.” Once you’ve learned the lesson, don’t wallow in self pity anymore. It’s time to move on.

The world owes you nothing. If you expect things from everyone, and make other people bend, you will become a toxic person in their life, and they will want to get rid of you.

Put your family first as long as they are not a toxic relationship. You can replace your social circle three times over, but your family is irreplaceable.

If your friends tell you a girl is flirting with you, believe them. They’re opinion of you and how attractive you are is a lot more accurate than your own at that age.

Learn to say no. Your time is your own. You need free time to recharge your batteries. Make sure you get a few hours every day to do something you like. Putting others first, all the time, will cause you to break. Be there when people need you, not every time they want you.

A thoughtful, personable, well written email sent once per year to a far away friend is often enough to keep a connection alive, just in case they come back. People used to write letters like this. Do not lose the art.

If you ever find that every guy/girl in the world sucks, change your selection criteria for how you pick your significant others.

Have fun. Don’t spend your whole life thinking how awesome tomorrow is going to be once you get everything sorted out. Think ahead, but today matters too.
– Anon Reddit

Not one person in your life now or in the future really has any idea WTF is going on. There is NO AUTHORITY on anything! Pretty much EVERYONE is making it up as they go. So don’t feel bad when you do it.
– Anon Reddit

I really can’t stress this enough. You’re a crappy person, only less so than some others. you’re an idiot, but so is everyone else.
– Anon Reddit

The more willful you are, the more disciplined you have to be. The stronger your will, the less anyone will be able to argue with you except yourself. And someone has to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses, and if you have more will than discipline you’ll just give into them and end up on a local maximum like drug addiction.
– Paul Graham

You need to believe you are good enough to make a change, and not be afraid of what may happen. Be honest – brutally honest with those that are dependent on you, because believe me, you are dependent on them, and will need their strength to help you through. This is more than shifting activities – you are ‘blowing out’ because you are avoiding confronting whatever it is you don’t want to deal with. That is your dragon – not that drinking, coke, food, cigarettes, sex – all those ‘pleasure seeking’ activities are a substitute for happiness.
Getting that happiness is what you want, but can’t find until you slay the real dragon – dealing with what you are pushing down. My father was rejected by his mother twice in his life, and loathed himself – no matter who loved him, or what joys life could bring, he never felt he deserved it. Thus, he was addicted to work, food, drugs, booze – you name it. If he could learn to accept himself, he may have been able to find real happiness.
– Anon Reddit

No man is an island, or a hero of solitude
– Anon Reddit

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
– Virginia Woolf

“Moods are processes — not events. They have a coming and a going. It means knowing that because something “feels so” doesn’t make it so.”
– Larry Drain

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
– Carl Jung

Changing yourself, and changing the world, both take time.
SS.//

How much of human life is lost in waiting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.
– Nicholas Chamfort

‘He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise’.”
– William Blake

With a broken heart, a perfect healing process is possible. All this needs is time plus a willingness to forgive and move on.

Are you looking for something that’s under your nose? Are you allowing yourself to believe that all would be fine if you could only change one thing, attain one item or get one person to see something differently? Maybe it would… but there’s an easier way to get satisfaction. Think less about what you imagine will ‘make the difference’ and more about the actual feeling of contentment that you yearn to have. What really keeps that at bay? An absence of something? Or a presence? Might you be harbouring a resentment, a fear, a desire to compensate for damage done in the past? Forgive more… and you’ll need less.
– Jonathan Cainer, 18/09/09 & 20/08/09

Men go for traits that are indicative of good mothership, namely, kindness, warmth, altruism, and emotional stability. Whilst women are hard-wired to think of long-term relationships. They like success and safety. Thus they go for intelligent men, intelligence today is what physical strength used to be. They like an ambitious, dominant, and leading personality. Ugliest traits in women, neuroticism, and any indication of psychological disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and psychopathy. In men, women dislike those who are introverted, unintelligent, unambitious, or lazy. Women dislike men with a big bum. And they subconsciously assess the waist to chest ratio.
– Dr Thomas Chamoro-Premuzic, at Goldsmiths college.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
– Lois McMaster Bujold

Character is just an invention…. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that guides our lives… and the longer we live with it the more boxed in we are by the rapidly diminishing variedness of our imagined selves. What we can’t ever accept is that we might never know who we are.”
– Kamila Shamsie from Broken Verses

I was not looking into your soul, but seeing only mine reflected back at me.
– SS.//

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
— Anaïs Nin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Anaïs Nin

A.C. Grayling: One very important moment in the history of philosophy is when Socrates said “the unconsidered life is not worth living”. This seems a very dramatic claim in a way. What he meant was that if you don’t reflect on your life, if you don’t consider it, if you don’t choose the values you’re going to live by, then you’re going to live by somebody else’s choices, you’re going to be like a football they’re kicking around because you haven’t chosen something and have directed your life towards those goals.

There’s a very, very big difference between having data and information, and turning that into knowledge, something you can make use of. And there’s yet a further step beyond knowledge, which is understanding, having good insights into what really matters. Now all this involves having to think clearly, think critically, you equip yourself with information about the world, to be literate across the whole range, and especially to be scientifically literate. Because in this world of ours now, to be an informed participant in the great conversation of mankind is to have an alert awareness, an understanding of what’s happening in the world.
So to be a good citizen of the world, to be a person who recognises somethings are valuable and to pursue those things, demands being critically reflective. To think about your ethics, to think about the world, to be well informed, to challenge yourself and other people when they certain claims or when you feel moved to make certain claims about the world. And I think one consequence of this is that I think people should think very critically and deeply about, for example, the claims of religion. Is that the source of value in the world or is it our humanity and our connection with human beings? So across a whole range, this central demand is to be critical, to be reflective, to think for one’s self. Betrand Russell once famously said “most people would rather die than think, and most people do”, and one doesn’t want to be one of them.

Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
– Voltaire

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
-Malcolm X

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
– Steve Jobs

Think of your sense of identity: not as some concrete construction; but as a box, a portfolio or a repertoire. It’s misleading to ask anyone who they are. A much better question is, ‘What range of characters do you play?’ Shakespeare was right, to some extent at least, to describe the whole world as a stage. We are all ‘actors’.
– Jonathan Cainer, Tuesday, 29 December 2009

Emotions are not actually facts.
– Anon

Much of human suffering is our own doing. Our feelings contract around threats to our sense of self and cloud our sense perceptions. We end up reacting, as if we had no other choice.
– B. Alan Wallace

How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude. But grant me still a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper–Solitude is sweet.
– William Cowpwer

Freud’s humble goal: to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
– Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904 – 1991

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
– Malcolm Forbes

You can’t set anyone else’s boundaries for them, you can, though, set your own. You can decide what you do or don’t find acceptable and refuse to cross that line unless there is an exceptionally good reason. This won’t necessarily make you popular, but it will bring clarity to a situation that is rapidly growing confused. It will also afford you some protection. You need to feel comfortable and you need to be satisfied that you are doing the right thing, regardless of how anyone else may be behaving. Follow your own highest ideals and strongest principles this week and you’ll gain all the respect and support you need.
J.Cainer 3/4/2010

Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue.
– Bertrand Russell, 1872 – 1970

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
– Alexander Hamilton, 1757 – 1804

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
– Jim Rohn, 1930 – 2009

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
– Voltaire

“Yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it we will only lose tomorrow.”
– Bill Clinton

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

“If you stare into the abyss, it stares back”

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

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

– All from Nietzsche

“In the depth of winter I learned there was, in me, an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus

“If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
– Mark Twain

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”
– Groucho Marx

The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation of the last, every moment smoothly following the the gentle curves of societal norms. we act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. And no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolly myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. That. Shit.”
— Randall Munroe

“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

“Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
– All by Stephen Jay Gould

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
Epicurus

“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”
— Chuck Klosterman, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”

“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.”
— “Synecdoche, New York”

“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
-Hamlet, Shakespeare.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” -Neil Gaiman

“Any idiot can face a crisis, it is this day-to-day living that wears you out”
– Chekhov

“…what one commonly takes as ‘the reality,’ including the reality of one’s own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.”
– Albert Hofmann

“A ship in port is safe…but that is not what ships are made for”
Moroccan proverb

Before you have the urge to go to an expert for the answer, remember even the experts don’t have the answer for anyone other than their own selves. Unless the expert has good questions to draw the answer from you, stay away from their cookie cutter approach to all situations.

Listen to what others have to say and then look for the confirmation from within… What feels right and is logical for you is the best answer. Your answer is custom made to fit you and can only come from you.

For instance, you are on the crossroads and you want to make a decision about changing careers.

Your gut has made the decision way before your intellect realizes. So why not go to the source first and then consult the intellect for practicality.

Following are the ways to reach the source:
1. Sit still until the mind becomes silent
2. While in the place of silence watch your breath come in and out
3. Continue to watch the breath till you reach a place of rest, where there is no mental agitation, worry, or concern
4. Now ask your question and remain silent until the first thought, image, feeling or sensation comes to you.
5. Take that thought, image, feeling or sensation and discover what it means to you.

For instance, a feeling of happiness would mean to move ahead whereas a feeling of anxiety would mean to research more or abandon the project. Thoughts and images are very personal and the interpretation would depend upon individual experience and the meaning you attach to it.

Next time in doubt reach deeper for the answer is within you.
– Neerja Bhatia http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-4062942,prtpage-1.cms

”We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”
– Thomas Mann, 1875 – 1955

“Risk-taking, trust, and serendipity are key ingredients of joy. Without risk, nothing new ever happens. Without trust, fear creeps in. Without serendipity, there are no surprises.”
– Rita Golden Gelman

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain

Choosing doesn’t limit choices — it just changes them.
– Claire Williams

“Sometimes the way guys express closeness to other guys is through humour that puts people down. When they try to use the same kind of humour with the women in their lives, it doesn’t come across the same way.”
– Howard Markman.

In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures, life may perfect be.
– Ben Jonson, 1572 – 1637

Success produces confidence; confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins the reputation which accuracy had raised.
– Ben Jonson, 1572 – 1637

For some people it’s a matter of scarcity. They view possessions as a type of security, an insulator against change. As long as you’ve got stuff—even worthless stuff like too many Post-It Note refills in your drawers and junkmail piled up on the sideboard—you’ve got some barrier against scarcity and want.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, Our presence automatically liberates others.

– Marianne Williamson

“There seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn’t just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. Conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.”
– Paul Graham

“When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles. | Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. | The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.”
– Paul Graham

“The whole idea of “your computer” is going away, and being replaced with “your data.” You should be able to get at your data from any computer. Or rather, any client, and a client doesn’t have to be a computer.”
– Paul Graham

“To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.”
– Paul Graham

“Good design solves the right problem. The typical stove has four burners arrange in a square, and a dial to control each. How do you arrange the dials? The simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a simple answer to the wrong question. The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row, the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials in a square like the burners.”
– Paul Graham

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
– C.S. Lewis

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
-Mark Twain

Through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that…. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.
– Martin Luther King Jr

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.”
– Bill Hicks

“If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are a slave.”
– Wayne Dyer

“I always believed that the people who were ‘sorted’ in life, were those who appeared sorted. Calm, composed, rational, were all the external qualities. Now I realise that’s bullshit. It’s not possible to go through life and be like that; it’s a front. It’s a cover and it involve emotional control and restriction of self-expression. To be ‘sorted’ involves feeling free to express ones feelings, confident, emotional, feeling. Not rigidity and self-control.”
– Deep

In response to a status that I’m keeping myself busy:
“Sounds a little bit like killing time – which is fine if you like it dead. I am sure you are really more purposeful than that?”
– Sandra Craig

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
– Hanlons Razor

“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.”
– Voltaire

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
– Albert Einstein

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.
– Thomas Berger

We’re all faced throughout our lives with agonising decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, but most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we make. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably and unfairly that human happiness doesn’t seem to have been included in the design of creation. It is only we, with our ability to love that gives meaning to an indifferent universe. And yet most human beings have the ability to keep trying and even to find joy in the simple things. Their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.
– Woody Allen

A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.
– Kenneth Tynan

When you want to believe something, when you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. You will take the random and give it purpose, transmutate the chaotic into the systemic, see chance as fate.
– http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/29/subjective-validation/

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.’ – Gustave Flaubert

‘

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamposts – for support rather than for illumination.’
– Andrew Lang

The power of unconditional love. I mean, there is no power on earth like unconditional love. And I think that if you offered that to your child, I mean you’re 90 percent of the way home. There may be days when you don’t feel like it, it’s not uncritical love, that’s a different animal, but to know you can always come back, that is huge in life. That takes you a long, long way. And I would say that every parent out there that can extend that to their child at an early age, it’s going to make for a better human being.
– Warren Buffet

‘Only in a condition of mutual forgiveness is life worthwhile.’
– Roger Scruton

‘Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.’
– Pablo Picasso

‘The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.’
– Martin Luther King

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
– Bertrand Russell

“To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. We have to ‘read’ what we feel and seem to see, and ask what those perceptions indicate and how we may take them into account without being overwhelmed by them.”
– Amartya Sen

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned”
– Buddha

“Holding resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”
– Anon

Believe nothing merely because you have been told it, or because it is tradition, or because you yourself have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for him. But whatever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, believe and cling to that doctrine, and take it as your guide.
– Buddha

“You are a human being first. Before race, country or religion.”
– Anon

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
-Plato

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then you may have underestimated the gravity of the situation.
– Jean Kerr

Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
– George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
– George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
– George Bernard Shaw

May this day find you at peace and leave you with hope
– Anon character in Star Trek Voyager

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
– Arundhati Roy

The path of least resistance leads round in a circle
– Jonathan Cainer.

Time doesn’t truly exist. We all live in the current moment and we forever will. The past is just ghosts and the future only fantasies. Tomorrow will never come.
– Anon reddit poster

Reality is a Mirror
When we look upon something, we see it through preconceptions, memories, and opinions we have associated with the object. So, as we look upon the world, we see more of ourselves than the objects that inhabit the world.
– Anon reddit poster

Most of what we are and much of the way we think, is a simple consequence of the behaviour of the physical world.
– Anon reddit poster

Live an honest life. The truth of you is more beautiful than any lie you could tell.
– Anon reddit poster

Light from the farthest ends of the universe takes ~ 13bn years to reach us…for the photons though…they “feel” no passage of time…time doesn’t exists for photons!! relativity can be awesome.
– Anon reddit poster

All matter is composed mostly of empty space.
– Anon reddit poster

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
-Dwight Eisenhower

“Write drunk; edit sober.”
– Hemingway

“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers”
– François Fénelon

“One should as a rule, respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”
-Bertrand Russell

“I contradict myself? Very well then; I am large, I contain multitudes.”
-Walt Whitman

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln

“You will think a lot less about what people think of you when you realise how seldom they do” – David Foster Wallace

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
– Bill Watterson

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
– Oscar Wilde

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
– Susan B. Anthony

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
-Philip K. Dick

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
– Carl Sagan.

“We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
– Carl Sagan.

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticised or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein

“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

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
– Winston Churchhill

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
-Winston Churchill

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”
-Dr. Seuss

The highest result of education is tolerance.
– Helen Keller

“The real measure of a person’s wealth is how much he would be worth if he lost all his money”
– Bernald Meltzer

“Ducunt volentem fata, no lentem trahunt” Which translates as: “The Fates lead him who will; those who don’t, they drag.”

wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither.’
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Act II, Scene II.
– William Shakespear

“We avoid risks in life so we can make it safely to death.”
– Anon

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
– Anon

“A mind without purpose will walk in dark places”
– Anon Reddit poster

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
– Albert Camus

“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
– Mark Twain

A wise man know an ignorant man because he was once ignorant, but and ignorant man does not know a wise man because because he was never wise.
– Anon

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
– Neale Donald Walsch

Knowledge is learning something every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.
– Zen Proverb

“Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. Today, we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.”
– Khalil Gibran

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
-Chaim Potok

“Once the game is over, the King and the Pawn go back in the same box.”
– Italian Proverb

“If you were going to do it tomorrow, do it today. If you were going to do it today, do it now.”
– Anon

“I always wanted a happy ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
–Gilda Radner (1946 – 1989)

“For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. ”
– Joseph Campbell

“The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. the sheer number of experiences i could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation of the last, every moment smoothly following the the gentle curves of societal norms. we act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us. And no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolly myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. It doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up.
This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. That. Shit.”
–xkcd

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”
– Michael J. Fox

“A man without enemies is a man without character.”
– Paul Newman

“A man who has no enemies, has no friends.”
– Ambrose Bierce

“Kid, I’ve slept longer than you’ve lived”
– Charles Bukowski

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”
-Salvador Dali

Everything in moderation, including moderation
– Anon

The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
– Voltaire

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

The people we judge and hate in life are in fact reflections of our disowned selves.
– Dr Hal Stone

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
– John Barrymore

Can there be a love which does not make demands on its object?
– Confucius

Habits change into character. (Publius Ovidius Naso Ovid)

There is no point at which having arrived we can remain.
– Unknown

Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.
– Anon

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
– Denis Diderot

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”
— Edvard Munch

Even on the most exalted throne in the world, we still sit upon our ass.
– Montaigne

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
– Umberto Eco

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.
– Voltaire

You can not reason out of someone that which was not reasoned in. Pick your fights, don’t waste your energy.
– Anon

“Never argue with an idiot, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

“Don’t wrestle with a pig – you’ll end up covered in mud and the pig will enjoy it”
– Anon

Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
– Anon.

Love is not about security, love is about reckless abandon. Letting go and just being is the most wonderful experience on the planet.
_ Anne Mortensen.

There’s no point in hurrying… or worrying. Nor, frankly, is there much point in subjecting your current cause for concern to some intense process of analysis. You can think all you like. You won’t square this particular circle with your intellect. Indeed, you may never come up with a solution that answers every aspect of your question. You will find a pleasing outcome, but you will attain it through simple faith and patience, not a process of mental gymnastics. Your heart now knows more than your head. Trust it. .. now, big changes are due to happen.
– Jonathan Caine, 02/10/2010

Life Choosing lies at the heart of our freedom, we’re told. Though it often feels like a burden. Why? asks Renata Salecl. It’s because choice is close to loss. To choose one thing is not to choose another – which is to lose it. We’re plagued by anxiety about whether we’ve made the right choice, by sadness at what we’ve not chosen, by fear that we’ll be condemned for what we’ve chosen.
– School of life on Rentata Salecl

‘If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?’
– T.H. Huxley

‘Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.’
– William Shakespeare

“Some people chase happiness. And some people choose happiness.”
– Robert Holden

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
– Abraham Lincoln

If you can’t beat ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit.
– Anon

He needs a clue-by-four to the head
– Anon

“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself…”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All the joy the world contains has come through wishing the happiness of others.”
– Shantideva

‘The cruelest lies are often told in silence.’
– Robert Louis Stevenson

‘It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.’
– Betty Friedan

“Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.”
– David Borenstein

‘What’s past help, should be past grief.’
– William Shakespeare

The way to ensure that tomorrow contains more joy, is to focus on what’s right about what’s happening, right now, today… and find a way to be glad of it.
– Jonathan Cainer

“A ‘no’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”
– Bob Marley

It took me a long time to come to the realization that I am not owed a good life by anything or anybody. What we make of what we have is all we get – it is up to you to figure it all out and there are no easy answers.
Being a child, especially a religious one, I always had the feeling that the way it was was the best way it could be and that keeping your nose to the grindstone and working within the system would lead to the life that you dream about (or the life you thought you should dream about).
We live in a world of limited resources. Modern medicine and technology have made it possible to have conveniences heretofore unheard of. Those conveniences have had, in my opinion, unexpected effects in that instead of leading to greater personal fulfillment they have detracted from it. I no longer feel like I have a stake in anything. Going to an office and pressing buttons all day is so far removed from the activities that offer fulfillment, sustenance, survival that it is almost impossible for your subconscious to connect them. In my experience, this leads to morose.
But that is the world we live in. You can do with it what you will. If that means disconnecting, making decisions that bring you closer to the hunter-gatherer mindset – removing modern convenience so that you can feel ancient fulfillment – maybe that is the best way. Who can say?
I have these goals in my head – of being successful in my career and making a lot of money and having a great family and one day getting to the point where I can spend a lot of time with my family and travel and see the world and spend the money that I have spent my life making. But when you put it that way, it all sounds so pathetic. Working your whole life to enjoy a small portion of it. But has anyone throughout history ever had it better? Think of the problems people used to have to deal with. Disease and starvation and infant mortality and brutal war torn society etc. etc. Did they “enjoy” life more than we did? I sincerely doubt it.
Which brings me to my ultimate conclusion: life is but a series of events that have no ultimate meaning beyond the immediate meaning you subscribe to them – and the cruel reality is that the vast majority of those events are painful, uncomfortable, boring, negative. You will spend the vast majority of your life anticipating better moments. Those better moments will be few and far between and you probably won’t even enjoy them as much as you probably should. There is no ultimate happiness. There is no ultimate sadness. There is only now. Wishing things were different will get you nowhere. Working to make things different will – but is this new version of your life actually better than the last? We can hope so, but ultimately it probably isn’t.
Human beings are cursed from the start with imagination and the capacity for abstract thought. We can imagine a life that is better than this one. We can dream of an ultimate happiness. We can taste it. But the natural world does not offer it up – the order of things as they are does not owe us what we can imagine. So we are left to work and toil towards an end that does not exist and cannot even possibly exist. And thus we all work and wait and hope and yearn for that which will never come and we ultimately die cold sad and alone.
But there is good news. Today is Friday! Hooray for weekends!

– youngearthevolution – Reddit

“time heals what reason cannot”
– Seneca

Mamihlapinatapai:
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1] It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
– Wikipedia

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are the dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
– T. E. Lawrence, 1888 – 1935

It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater your advantage. Also then you will not go mad yourself.
– T. E. Lawrence, 1888 – 1935

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
– T. E. Lawrence, 1888 – 1935

I can have fear, but I need not be fear.
– Parker Palmer

Affection without sentiment, authority without cruelty, discipline without aggression, humor without ridicule, sacrifice without obligation, companionship without possessiveness.
– William E. Blatz

‘Man goes into the noisy crowd to drown his own clamour of silence.’
– Rabindranath Tagore

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
– C.S. Lewis

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
– William Butler Yeats

The really shy, introverted girl always sees herself as traditional, no matter what kind of a person she is deep down. The role play of getting married excites and scares her. She thinks “to me it’s real. To him it’s just a silly game.” Unconsciously she’ll fight this idea, thinking she isn’t actually ready for that kind of commitment to a man, and close herself off to you. Basically, shy girls see themselves as idealized romantics, and have an extreme form of the anti-slut defense, often because marriage is their only goal. Her unconscious is more realistic about her desires. She needs to see the world and meet lots of men.
Be the person who shows her how to have fun. Your job is to epitomize lightness and a carefree attitude toward love and sex. If you don’t steer her this way, she’ll immediately set you up with a test to prove whether you’re the one. If you fail this, she’s gone. If you pass it, she’s hooked. Do NOT go down that road.
Preempt this test now. Prove to her that you’re not the one, but keep her smiling all the way. Unfit for one another, you are merely companions on the rocky road of life. Your loneliness incites passion.
– imisunderstandyou Redditor on shy girls

My children are ungrateful: they don’t care. That is my great reward. They are free.
– Fay Weldon

A good gift is something you didn’t know you wanted.
– Anon

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.
– John Stuart Mill, 1806 – 1873

Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.
– Tao

I have loved you more than I can say. We are one being, but we now must part and never hear our common speech again. Do not forget my fingers or our voice. I will not hear you, but remember you.
– Vikram Seth, an equal music

We don’t fall in love with a person because of their qualities, per se. Rather, we fall in love with ourselves in their presence. In other words, we fall in love with the version of ourselves that we become when we are around them.
– Hank Davis

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can.”
– John Wooden

“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, But lust’s effect is tempest after sun; Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain, Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done; Love surfeit’s not, Lust like a glutton dies, Love is all truth, Lust full”
– William Shakespeare

‘Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side that he never shows to anybody.’
– Mark Twain. ‘

Lady Astor: Sir, If you were my husband I would poison your tea.
Churchill: Madam, if you were my wife I would drink it.
– Churchill

An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life: “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt and ego.The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. This same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”The old chief simply replied, “The one you feed.”
– Anon

Concealed talent brings no reputation.
– Desiderius Erasmus, 1466 – 1536

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
– Theodore Roosevelt, 1858 – 1919

Truth is not determined by majority vote.
– Doug Gwyn

It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he’s in love, drunk, or running for office.
– Shirley MacLaine

To choose, it is first necessary to know.
– Herman Finer, 1898 – 1969

When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take – choose the bolder.
– W. J. Slim

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way. You become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
– Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
– Eugène Ionesco, 1909 – 1994

The “silly question” is the first intimation of some totally new development.
– Alfred North Whitehead, 1861 – 1947

There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.
– Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 1865 – 1923

The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.
– H. R. Trevor-Roper, 1914 – 2003

This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.
– Orson Scott Card

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart
– William Wordsworth

It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.
– Darrin Weinberg

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
– Jon Kabat-Zinn

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.
– Kahlil Gibran

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.
– Nicholas Chamfort

Egotism is the anaesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
– Frank Leahy

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
– George Bernard Shaw

The truth that is universally acknowledged is that loneliness is inevitable, love is hopeful, and happiness is possible
– Email

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
– Abraham Lincoln

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
– Alfred North Whitehead

Are you looking for the meaning of life? How is it going? For many, the search easily deteriorates into endless preoccupation. The very act of asking ‘why?’ can backfire. The problem is, the mind is pretty bad at knowing when to stop asking such questions. We can easily end up going round and round in circles, lost in our heads, and out of touch with what is actually going on.
So here’s an alternative: right now, in this moment, see if you can focus on the sounds that are around you. Take a moment to pause, and become aware of the sounds themselves, just as they are.
Now, see if you can bring your attention to sensations in the body: the breath moving in and out, and the sensations where the body is in contact with the floor or your chair. Allow yourself to experience the body, just as it is – fully alive to any and all sensations. Take your time, there’s no rush.
And if your mind wanders, simply notice where it went, then very gently bring it back to your breath and body.
Right here and now, you’re cultivating the art of being still, fully alive to things as they are, without striving to shut out the noise of daily living or the clutter of a busy mind. This is a moment of mindfulness, inviting you to come home to yourself.
It’s possible to discover mindfulness in other ordinary moments of your day. No longer lost in your head, you’re better able to reclaim your life.
Joseph Campbell summed it up so well: “People say that what we’re all seeking is the meaning of life. I don’t think that that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive”.

– Mark Williams [school of life]

An orientation “inconsistent with societal values” is a risk factor for poor mental health. Psychological adjustment depends on the degree of match between personality and the values of surrounding society.”
– Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Ayse Ayçiçegi

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
– Bertrand Russell

There are two basic emotions that guide us. We either feel good about something, or feel bad about it.
– Anon Reddit poster

Re: Google. “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”
– Anon Reddit poster

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
– William James

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
– Elbert Hubbard

Loneliness is not so much a symptom of being companionless as it is a driving force behind social isolation. Rather than simply reflecting the emotional state of one person, Cacioppo says, loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population.

But how does a person “catch” loneliness? Based on the new data, Cacioppo theorizes that it is passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity. “People who feel lonely view the social world as more threatening,” he says. “They may not be aware they are doing it, but lonely individuals think negatively about other people. So if you are my friend, and I started to treat you negatively, then over time, we would stop being friends. But in the meantime, our interactions caused you to treat other people less positively, so you’re likely to lose friends, and they in turn are likely to lose friends. That appears to be the means of transmission for loneliness.”

– John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago

Dating Karma Rule #3: Put your past where it belongs
An unforgiving heart is the number one blockage to true love. Sure, we’ve all been hurt. Yet you only keep the pain alive if you harbor grudges or cling to bad memories. The key to letting go of the past is to forgive the person who hurt you and then to forgive yourself for your role in the relationship. It sure can be tough, but your future depends on it.
How to do it:
Stop beating yourself up about past bad choices by saying to yourself, “There is nothing wrong with taking chance on love.” All relationships require risk-taking.
Erase bad memories by changing yourself or your surroundings: Get a haircut. Take up a new hobby that will bring you into contact with other single people. Visit a new place on your next date, not old haunts. This will make it easier to keep old pain from coloring your future.
– Barrie Dolnick

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
— Isaac Asimov

Playboy:
“If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?” Kubrick: “Yes, for those of us who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from the twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. he may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring ans sustaining. the most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
– Stanley Kubrick

Life comes with no guarantees, no time outs, no second chances. Live life to the fullest, tell someone what they mean to you, dance in the pouring rain, comfort a friend, fall asleep watching the sun come up, smile until your face hurts & don’t be afraid to take chances or fall in love. Most of all live in the moment because every second you spend angry or upset is a second of happiness you can never get back’
– Anon

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.’ – Aristotle

Take action stop stalling: in life, love & relationships. Ask yourself;
What am I waiting for?
What would I do if I weren’t scared?
What steps would make things easier?
What would I do if I had all the time and money in the world?
What is the worst, and the best, that could happen?

?’Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.’
– Joseph Conrad

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
– Walt Kelly

Use Occam’s Razor in interpersonal relations: look for the simplest, most straightforward explanation that assumes the best of everybody. Stay away from people who always have a conspiracy theory involving twisted office politics, unfulfilled Machiavellian ambitions, and unspoken agendas.
– Philip Su

You can control outcomes with three types of approaches: a) People Control, where you decide who to hire, who to fire, and who to put in what positions; b) Action Control, where you tell people what to do; and c) Results Control, where you define the metrics of success. Know when to use which.
– Philip Su

‘If you are looking for answers, you’d better choose the question carefully.’
– Javier Bardem

Can we call a truce with all these plunking profundities for a bit? One makes you think; two is good … three adds to life’s riches but after a while this relentless feed of deep thought finger-wagging gets on my tits. I’m just saying.
– Norma Laming

W.E. HENLEY; INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
– Mahatma Gandhi

The funny thing about language is that it’s meaning is not necessarily a reflection of conventional definition, but rather, the mutual understanding by both parties and the connotation of its use.
– Andrewticus04 Reddit

You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime.
– Neil Gaiman

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, ‘Yes gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart what goes up, up, up must come down. Amen!’ If they did that, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
– Dan Barker

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.
– Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1865

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
– Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
– James Matthew Barrie, 1860 – 1937

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
– Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905 – 1980

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 – 1882

For disappearing acts, it’s hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
– Doug Larson, 1902 – 1981

But ultimately, what I think both of us failed to grasp is that love is a singularity beyond comprehension – not due to its complexity, but because its simplicity is not something we can fathom. In our subjective realities love is difficult and hard, and impossible to understand. We project a complexity onto it that simply doesn’t exist. Because, in objective reality, love is… It just IS. Simple as.
– Daria87

“The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.”
– Blaise Pascal.

“People don’t realize that the future is just now, but later.”
— Russell Brand

We’re wired for attachment in a world of impermanence”
– Robert Neimeyer,

“The devil is in the definition of “success”. Sure, let’s enjoy the technological advances and the economic progress born from the fruits of neuroses, but for the vast majority of the rest of us, greater life satisfaction comes from recognising that happiness and contentment today drive our success, not the other way around.”
– FT.com / Comment / Letters – Time to recognise that happiness – not neurosis – drives our success – From Mr John Garrity, Washington, DC, US

Some journeys can only be made by travelling along rough roads.
– Jonathan Cainer

1) Catch yourself every time you make a negative comment or judgement about someone else. Either shut the fuck up about it or rephrase yourself. People are more distrustful of gossips and being negative about others reinforces a pessimistic negative attitude inside yourself. Try and find positive things about other people and it becomes a pattern in your life. If you’re thinking about more positive things it makes you into a happier more positive person. Girls want a guy who’s fun and happy in himself; they don’t want a negative dude who’s always bitching or complaining about others.
2) Take your time to realize that things are not as bad as you think they are. I often see dudes on the train stressing out or cussing because the train is late, or someone’s walking slowly in front of them. Just relax. There’s no reason to get stressed over shit that you can’t do anything about. Remember this quote: “Control the things you can control, let everything else take a flying fuck”. Say it out loud. SAY IT OUT LOUD NOW.
3) Actually fucking listen to stuff other people say and try to understand why they’re saying it. If you want to build strong relationships with your lovers and friends and become a real people person, you need to really listen to what they say. When someone hangs out with you, they are giving some of their most precious commodity to you, TIME. If someone chooses to be with you, then you better fucking value their choice and listen to what they have to say. People say things for a reason, and it’s your duty to listen to them and try to relate it back to them. If you do this you’ll find you really start to understand other people and your conversations will be deeper and more meaningful.
4) Stop arguing. Put simply, no one likes an arguer, don’t be one of those people who keeps arguing and arguing and never gives up a point, much to the annoyance of everyone else. I used to do this because I had an argumentative dad and it turned me into a stubborn mother-fucker. I had a revelation when I was 22 and arguing with my girlfriend over doing the fucking dishes. “Wow, this is completely ridiculous, what a waste of time”. If you “win” an argument, you’ve won nothing; it’s a contradiction. Generally what happened is you annoyed someone else and won no friends. Learn to realize when a debate will never end and just LET IT GO. I think actually being able to say: “actually this is fucking stupid, let’s stop arguing” is a big DHV.
5) Take a few moments each day to remember good shit from your past. Think about the people from your past that you have respect for. Now remember any good things that they said about you or compliments that they gave you. This may be an ex-girlfriend, a friend whatever, even a hot girl from a club. Think back to whatever they said about you and imagine them standing in front of you giving you that compliment. Then imagine being that person and looking back at yourself as they compliment you. Try to see yourself from their eyes. Understand that they really meant what they said and that you can take massive positivity from whatever they said.
6) “Everything I do, I rush through so I can do something else”. This is a quote from a favorite poem of mine, it illustrates the way most people live their lives. The days become a stressful blur, nothing ever seems to get finished, and you dwell on the future and cannot enjoy the present fully. Take a moment to take a step back and fucking breathe. Don’t dwell too much on the future, it will come when it comes but don’t let it stress you right now. (Side note: learn to meditate and start doing yoga. These will both help with this step)
7) Finish what you start. Get into the habit of finishing each task you start, get into the habit of doing this and it becomes a real source of happiness and confidence in your life. Start by ensuring you finish all your small tasks, such as reading an article or hitting on 5 girls (or whatever target) in a night. Don’t set your goals too wildly
8) Learn shit. Finish that book on psychology or philosophy; the act of learning new things and keeping the brain working seems to have a slowing effect on time. Also, when you’re learning new things it makes you a more interesting person to other people. I often go into deep conversations about Psychology with women and they love it! I learned all that stuff just from all the Psych books I read from learning about seduction, female psychology etc. I also study poetry and literature in my spare time, guess what? Girls love this stuff too. Seduction/PUA isn’t just about games and tricks and routines, it’s also about making yourself into a genuinely interesting and well-rounded individual. Being smart and knowledgable about the world is sexy and powerful.
9) Make peace with your past. Come to realize that you cannot change the past. Whatever bad stuff happened to you, however much you got hurt by that girl or those bullies or your asshole dad. Let it go. No good comes from revisiting it again and again. In fact, the more you think about it, the more you dwell on it. Look back at point 2. This comes under the category of “things you can’t control”. If you can’t do something about it, and you certainly cannot change your past, then there’s no fucking use in worrying about it or dwelling on it. I’ve found that so many people dwell on bad moments in their past even when they know that these memories make them sad. It becomes a habit and eventually becomes such a part of your character that you’re almost afraid to let it go. It’s like a safety blanket. It’s exactly the same reason why some people who have been overweight for many years find it so hard to lose the weight; it has become part of their identity and losing the weight is almost like killing part of their personality. The thing about this point is that it’s suprisingly easy; your mind is under your control. You decide what you think about. If you spend your time thinking about how awesome your ex was and how sad you are; stop fucking thinking about it. Imagine yourself surrounded by smoking hot 9s and being the life of the party.
10) Keep in touch. Stay in touch with your friends. When things aren’t going so well, good friends will be there for you. No matter how bullet-proof you think you are, friends are always an asset. So shout out to them often, even if it’s just a text message or short email. Having lots of friends is a massive confidence booster and also a good friendship network is a gold-mine for meeting new girls. Also the advantage of meeting girls this way is you don’t even need an opener and there’s zero approach anxiety.
– KillYourTelevision Reddit

Don’t write a plan, write a mood.

Yes or No: We have to say, ‘no’ to some things to be able to say, ‘yes’ to opportunities. There are times we say ‘yes’ to others, because it’s easier to say ‘no’ to ourselves than to say ‘no’ to others. By ignoring our own feelings, we’re undermining our self esteem. Today, when you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, say it for the right reason.
Inner space 23/11/2010

Everything will be Fine
When there’s a crisis, there is also opportunity, and in order to see the opportunity we need courage and trust. Courage helps us to feel that there is benefit in every unfolding scene of life. Trust helps us to stay stable and calm in the face of crisis. Courage and trust gives us the assurance that everything will be fine.
Inner space 24/11/2010

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Most men even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that.” Thoreau saw “a stereotyped but unconscious despair which permitted no relaxation from the young nation’s frenzied strivings.”
– Henry David Thoreau

If a boy must wonder:
If a boy must wonder,
let him recall
not the lightning grace of falcons,
the dizzying aeronautics, Darwin’s finch,
the voyage of ancients
who saw farther, whose charts and sails
and bubbly telescopic minds
brought ashore hope
to lift
a charioting god to the moon
but how
even a rogue dream of stars
once birthed the possibility of flight.
-Leon Yuchin Lau (1993)

The Importance of Attitude

Attitude is essentially a blend of perceptions, thoughts and feelings about anyone or anything. It is influenced by memories, past experiences and beliefs.

Although we may not notice, our attitude sits at the heart of all that we say and do. It’s our attitude that reflects back to us in our relationships and it’s our attitude that can rub off onto others.

So, it makes obvious sense to hold a positive attitude at all times in all situations.
– Thought for today 01/12/2010

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell

My favourite quote from someone reviewing a websites navigation:
“It’s like trying to navigate a minefield, but without the benefit of death.”

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
– Satre

Sweet Words
A bitter tongue makes life bitter; a sweet tongue makes life better. Instead of being forceful and bitter with the truth, allow the truth to be coated with kindness and compassion, make it sweet. Sweetness makes the truth more palatable, easier to digest. It softens the hard facts without disguising them. Make sweetness your natural nature, and then your words will automatically be filled with sweetness.
Thought for today 17/12/2010

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart
– William Wordsworth

Understand behaviour not technology
–

Even without such evidence, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, is convinced that the approach to matchmaking embodied by many dating sites represents a market failure. In a recent book, “The Upside of Irrationality”, he argues that the sites treat human beings as if they are goods that can be fully defined according to a set of standard attributes, in much the same way that, say, a digital camera can be described by the number of megapixels that it has and other characteristics. But this cold, drearily functional approach to assessing compatibility fails to capture the indefinable spark that triggers romance.
– Economist 2010

Love is not blind; it is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard.
– James Matthew Barrie, 1860 – 1937

Albert Einstein:
“Education is what is left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned.”

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

Loving is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
– Author Unknown

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
– William Shakespeare

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
– Ben Hecht

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.
– Henry Van Dyke

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

I’ve fallen in love many times… always with you.
– Author Unknown

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.
– Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love is a game that two can play and both win.
– Eva Gabor

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
– Zora Neale Hurston

The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
– Margaret Atwood

Love is the poetry of the senses.
– Honoré de Balzac

Come live in my heart and pay no rent.
– Samuel Lover

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.
– Attributed to Claudia Ghandi

“The horizon of many people is a circle with zero radius which they call their point of view.”
– Albert Einstein

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
– Albert Einstein

“When a symbol unmoors itself from what it symbolises, it loses meaning. It becomes ineffective”
– Arundhati Roy

“Forget trying to achieve balance. Living life is more of a real-time readiness to pivot as your life demands. If you haven’t been spending enough time with your kids, go home. If you haven’t been spending enough time at work, stay longer. There is no perfect set amount or schedule that will keep you happy all the time.”
– Anonymous

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
– Noel Coward

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”
– Bertrand Russell

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
– Albert Einstein

Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not.
– Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

Look for the benefit in everything that happens.
– Thought for the day email

Eloquent speech is not from lip to ear, but rather from heart to heart
– William Jennings Bryan

It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

Every vice you destroy has a corresponding virtue, which perishes along with it.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
– Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

Focus on the road not the wall — When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely capsize your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
– Ben Horrowitz http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/

There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation.
Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955

There may be surprises in store for us [after death], however improbable it seems and however little evidence suggests it. But I do not hope for that. Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life. If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep seems bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss.
Those who loved with all their heart and mind might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it.
The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worth while and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.
If I ask myself who in history I might like to have been, I find that all the men I most admire were by most standards deeply unhappy. They knew despair. But their lives were worth while – I only wish mine equaled theirs in this respect – and I have no doubt that they were glad to die.
As one deserves a good night’s sleep, one also deserves to die. Why should I hope to wake again? To do what I have not done in the time I’ve had? All of us have so much more time than we use well. How many hours in a life are spent in a way of which one might be proud, looking back?
For most of us death does not come soon enough. Lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant. One lives better when one expects to die, say, at forty, when one says to oneself long before one is twenty: whatever I may be able to accomplish, I should be able to do by then; and what I have not done by then, I am not likely to do ever. One cannot count on living until one is forty – or thirty – but it makes for a better life if one has a rendezvous with death.
Not only love can be deepened and made more intense and impassioned by the expectation of impending death; all of life is enriched by it. Why deceive myself to the last moment, and hungrily devour sights, sounds, and smells only when it is almost too late? In our treatment of others, too, it is well to remember that they will die: it makes for greater humanity.

-Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic

It’s just as important to be firm as it is to be fair. If you don’t take a firm stance about a sensitive matter, you will be unfair to yourself. Yet if you don’t make an effort to be scrupulously fair, you can end up becoming not so much firm as brittle; unable to adapt or adjust because you’re so busy trying to justify an overly emphatic and somewhat unbalanced assertion. In a key area of emotional sensitivity, you’ve now got to do what’s really right, not just what looks good. Even if that means looking a bit soft.
– Jonathan Cainer 24/04/2011

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element…it is my mood that makes the weather” – Goethe

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars
– T.E. Lawrence

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. -Thomas Moore

All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind, and suffering follows as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.

All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind, and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow.

“He abused me, attacked me, defeated me, robbed me!” For those carrying on like this, hatred does not end.

“She abused me, attacked me, defeated me, robbed me!” For those not carrying on like this, hatred ends.

Hatred never ends through hatred. By non-hate alone does it end. This is an ancient truth.

Many do not realize that we here must die. For those who realize this, quarrels end.
– Dhammapada.

We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient; that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity; and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.
– JFK

Every week, more or less, there appears a new scientist or guru claiming to have discovered, at last, the secret of life. And everything from breakfast cereals to cars to garden furniture are sold not for what they do, but for the fullness of life they offer.
– Mark Vernon

‘There is an expiry date on how long you can blame your parents for the choices that you make in your life’
– J.K.Rowling

Love is…the continual search for a basic, secure connection with someone else. Through this bond, partners in love become emotionally dependent on each other for nurturing, soothing, and protection.
– Sue Johnson (Hold me tight) http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/21064

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.
– Kate Douglas Wiggin

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
– Honoré de Balzac, 1799 – 1850

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.
– Rudyard Kipling, 1865 – 1936

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved.
– Erich Fromm, 1900 – 1980

Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
– Albert Einstein

“One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”
—Albert Einstein

“The most important thing is to learn that good enough is almost always good enough; you don’t need to find the best. You’ll be happier if, once you find something that meets your standards, you stop looking and don’t worry about it.”
-Barry Schwartz

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance…nay, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
– Stephen Hawking.

Poverty is not deprivation. It is isolation.
– Jon Bischke [http://jonbischke.com/2011/05/26/what-really-keeps-poor-people-poor/]

Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Norman Vincent Peale

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Nothing is impossible; the word itself says ‘I’m possible’!
Audrey Hepburn

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’”
– George Bernard Shaw quotes

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
– George Bernard Shaw quotes

“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.”
– Voltaire

“If you love two people at the same time, choose the second one, because if you really loved the first one you wouldn’t have fallen for the second”
– ?

Advice from anonymous dads:

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
– Anon.

If your co-workers and boss aren’t going to miss you when you leave then you’re not doing your job.
– Anon

“All of marketing revolves around an erect penis.”
“Every prostitute, murderer, and thief can justify their actions completely.”
“Work without a deadline is masturbation.”
“You are characterized by what you do.”
“There’s no faster way to be successful in a company than to accept responsibility.”
– Mr-z (reddit) anon

If you think you might get serious with your girl, look at the mother. They eventually turn out to be very similar.
– Anon

“You’re not ready. You’ll never be ready. So just go do it already.”
– Anon

“Women already have one pussy, they don’t want another one.”
– Anon

If you are in bed with a woman and she asks you to tell her she is beautiful. Tell her she is beautiful. If she asks you to tell her you love her. Tell her she is beautiful.
– Anon

It’s easier to get forgiven than to get permission
– Anon

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
– Goethe

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
– Arundhati Roy

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.
– Lao Tzu

Let fear be not a stop-sign, but a signpost towards those things which you must do.
– John Morgan

Optimism. It’s not about believing that everything happens for the best; it’s about making the best of the things that happen
– Action for happiness

“Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But today 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 to the dawn.”
– Sanskrit Proverb

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares.
– Elbert Hubbard

“It is hard, so terribly hard, to please yourself…that true self that lies deep within us.”
– Christopher Alexander

The advice that people give to you speaks more to their successes and failures than yours.
– Anon, reddit

People know more than you think they do, but less than they think they do.
– Anon, reddit

Cui Bono (Who Profits), Find out who profits from a decision and you will discover the people behind the decision.
– Anon, reddit

Law has very little do with “justice” in the traditional sense, and rather focuses on maintaining internal consistency and abiding by its own institutional rules.
– Anon, reddit

We are all African, some of us just left earlier than others.
– Anon, reddit

Whether you are looking to get laid, or married, finding the woman you want to be with boils down to loving yourself, and facing the fears about yourself and your life that most of us men are not even aware that we have.
or as Nada Surf says: ” To find someone to love, you gotta be someone you love, you have to call your own bluff. ”
– Anon, reddit

You are the universe experiencing itself subjectively.
– Anon, reddit

Wherever you go, there you are.
– Anon, reddit

Women can be attractive, sane, and available, but never all three simultaneously.
– Anon, reddit

“Never make someone a priority to whom you are just an option.”
– Unknown

“Could it be that the learned habit, the automated response to the stories of our mind, is to believe in them? Could it be that this believing in the mind’s stories about the appearances is what’s limiting our perception and the direct experience of who we are? Could it be that all that’s needed to free our perception is to gradually ‘loosen’ our beliefs in everything that keeps appearing within our awareness?”
– Bentinho Massaro

Acts born out of emotion don’t ever stand up to reason
– Johnathan Cainer

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.
– Tom Robbins

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
– Tom Robbins

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
– Tom Robbins

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.
– Howard Thurman

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
– William Gibson

“People like you are the reason we have middle fingers.”

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

Love takes off masks we fear we cannot live without.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

Someone told me life is a water wheel. It turns. The trick is to hold your nose when you’re under and not get dizzy when you’re up.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
James Baldwin, 1924 – 1987

If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 – 1941

I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.
– Vincent van Gogh, 1853 – 1890

Don’t do stupid shit. Same thing applies in job interviews and dating. The people opposite the table from you want you to succeed because no one likes giving interviews or going on first dates. They just want to fill the vacancy. All you have to do is not disqualify yourself by being stupid or obnoxious.
– dschobel Hackernews

Strong minded, resolutely willed, you can create out of nothing a great business, a huge empire, a new world. Others have and they have no monopoly.
– Claude M. Bristol, 1891 – 1951

Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
– John Dryden, 1631 – 1700

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.
– John Dryden, 1631 – 1700

But far more numerous was the herd of such,
Who think too little, and who talk too much.
– John Dryden, 1631 – 1700

Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts.
– John Dryden, 1631 – 1700

Love works a different way in different minds,
the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
– John Dryden, 1631 – 1700

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
– H. L. Mencken

The way I think, suits a world that doesn’t exist.
– SS.//

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
— Marilyn Monroe

In the end we only regret the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we were scared to have and the decisions we waited too long to make. There comes a time in your life when you realise who matters, who doesn’t, who never did and who always will. So don’t worry about the people from your past, there’s a reason they didn’t make it to your future.”
– Anon

You can spend, minutes, hours, days, weeks or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened – or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the f**k on.
-Tupac

Be careful who you open up to. Only a few people actually care, the rest are just curious.
– Anon

I may not be the most beautiful girl or the sexiest girl nor do I have a perfect body. I might not be everyone’s first choice, but I’m a great choice. I do not pretend to be someone I’m not, because I’m good at being me.
– Anon

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
– Steve jobs

“Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic.”
– Tryon Edwards

“We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions”
– Ian Percy

“Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.”

“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.”
– Bernard Shaw

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
– Jonathan Swift

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
– Voltaire

“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
– Buckminster Fuller

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, said:
“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
– Dalai Lama

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

“The world is too big for love to be real. There are too many people in the world to ever know, beyond everything, that you are with the right person. That your heart is as swollen as it can be. Think of all the people in China. It is unlikely anyone will ever meet all of them. How can we know for certain, that trapped inside a foreign language and thumping in a foreign heart there isn’t a love that is meant for us. The infinite possibility of existence, its limitless potential, is the proof that we need that love is nothing more than an imagination, a human folly, friendship swollen with self-importance, a final retreat from the storm of possibility. The love of our life could so easily have been someone else. It is random and accidental, haphazard and unsystematic. That which we feel for one person, clinging on to the delusion of destiny, could so easily be felt for a million people should the timing and the meetings and the mutual readiness have coalesced at some other time in some other place. Should someone else have accepted us or rejected us then everything would have been different. And once we know this, we know that all love is a lie. Not honesty but deception. Not heroism but cowardice. An unspoken agreement of mutual consolidation and compromise, a shield from possibility and a bed in which to sleep, nothing more than that. But I do still miss her.”
– Daniel Kitson

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today.”
– Lawrence M. Krauss

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
– HL Mencken

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice … you don’t.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying … lobbying, to get what they want … Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want … they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that … that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers … Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it … they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The big club.
By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.
Good honest hard-working people … white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what colour shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means … continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you … they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all … at all … at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain wilfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it…
– George Carlin

“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.

His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water–and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden–it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written.

Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words–three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man-the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”
– Mark Twain

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
– Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884 – 1962

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower,

Retreat, hell! We’re just advancing in another direction.
– Oliver Prince Smith, 1893 – 1977

No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.
– Carrie Fisher

“Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.”
– Stendhal

You must get involved to have an impact. No one is impressed with the won-lost record of the referee.

You can never make the same mistake twice, the second time you make it, it is no longer a mistake, it is a choice.

A companion loves some agreeable qualities which a man may possess, but a friend loves the man himself.
– James Boswell, 1740 – 1795

Although I do not believe in God, atheists can be (and usually are) annoying as religious idiots. Keep both your beliefs and lack of belief to yourself, no one wants to hear it.

Circumcision is the worst decision and well-intended parent can make for their son. I am circumcised but I do not delude myself into believing that I am experiencing sex the way nature and evolution intended.

You are friend-zoned because women construe your excessive emotionality and want as feminine and needy. A woman wants to lose herself and feel secure in your masculinity. Most women are emotional and neurotic enough without having to deal with your emotional bullshit.

Never tolerate a woman’s bullshit. If a woman is emotional and upset, distract them: pick them up and dance, tell a story, take her for a walk. If that doesn’t work, leave her alone. If it never works, dump her. And remember, infidelity is never justifiable. A woman who uses you to rescue her, she will eventually use another man to rescue her from you.

Emo and self-pity is narcissism disguised as depth, and this is why people resent your woe-is-me bullshit.

Contrary to popular belief, depression is not a painful experience. Depression is a numbing strategy usually developed in childhood as a way to keep you safe from the consequences of your anger. An emotionally healthy person can allow himself to feel anger without reacting to it. When you numb yourself from real pain (anger), you block off the joy in your life and become depressed.

Cigarettes stunt emotional growth. Smoking seems fun because life at an early age is relatively easy. But look at a smoker in his/her 40 and tell me they look happy.

Japanese culture is not amazing. Japanese culture is oppressive and stifling and that’s why so many nips kill themselves. Weeaboos have Peter Pan syndrome.

Spend time with other men. Spending time with a hunting party (camping, sports, beach, pub, etc) creates a sense of belonging, well-being and safety in this world. It is also how we make connections.

The older you get, the more you market value increases. At your age women are over-valued in society. By the time you’re 30 or 40, it will be a man’s market. Don’t be in such a hurry to commit.

Do not have a child with a woman unless you have been with her for more than a few trouble-free years. If you have a kid with a cunt, prepare to support a family that you will NEVER be part of.

Sometimes your dick knows things better than you do. If you can’t get it up for a particular woman, that is your subconscious telling you that she is not right for you.
Never marry a woman unless she loves you more than you love her.

You impending sense of doom is nothing but emotional residue – there is nothing wrong. Even when something is wrong, nothing is wrong. You deal with problems as they arise, no big deal.

Honor is a male abstraction, don’t expect women to understand.

– Oldguyfag (internet commenter)

Latin phrases:
ab imo pectore from the deepest chest Or “from the bottom of my heart”, “with deepest affection”, “sincerely”.. Attributed to Julius Caesar.
absit iniuria verbis (or injuria) let injury be absent from [these] words Expresses the wish that no insult or wrong be conveyed by the speaker’s words, i.e., “no offence”. See also absit invidia.
abyssus abyssum invocat deep calleth unto deep From Psalms 42:7; some translations have ‘Sea calls to sea’.
agere sequitur credere action follows belief “We act according to what we believe (ourselves to be)”.[2
cacoethes scribendi insatiable desire to write Caco?thes[5] “bad habit”, or medically, “malignant disease” is a borrowing of Greek kakó?thes.[6] The phrase is derived from a line in the Satires of Juvenal: Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes, or “the incurable desire (or itch) for writing affects many”. See hypergraphia.
carpe noctem seize the night An exhortation to make good use of the night, often used when carpe diem, q.v., would seem absurd, e.g., when observing a deep sky object or conducting a Messier marathon or engaging in social activities after sunset.
condemnant quod non intellegunt They condemn what they do not understand orThey condemn because they do not understand The quod here is ambiguous: it may be the relative pronoun or a conjunction.
contraria contrariis curantur the opposite is cured with the opposite First formulated by Hippocrates to suggest that the diseases are cured with contrary remedies. Antonym of similia similibus curantur (the diseases are recovered with similar remedies.)
cor ad cor loquitur heart speaks to heart From Augustine’s Confessions, referring to a prescribed method of prayer: having a “heart to heart” with God. Commonly used in reference to a later quote by Cardinal John Henry Newman. A motto of Newman Clubs.
corruptio optimi pessima the corruption of the best is the worst
cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit, cras amet May he love tomorrow who has never loved before; And may he who has loved, love tomorrow as well It’s the refrain from the ‘Pervigilium Veneris’, a poem which describes a three day holiday in the cult of Venus, located somewhere in Sicily, involving the whole town in religious festivities joined with a deep sense of nature and Venus as the “procreatrix”, the life-giving force behind the natural world.
crescente luce Light ever increasing Motto of James Cook University.

Defences protect you, but also cut you off. Use them sparingly
– D&M

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.
– Frank Herbert, 1920 – 1986

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
– Vladimir Nabokov, 1899 – 1977

I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
– Abigail Adams, 1744 – 1818

You can’t shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.
– P. J. O’Rourke

Worrying is less work than doing something to fix the worry. Everyone wants to save the earth, nobody wants to help mom with the dishes.
– P. J. O’Rourke

When people don’t want to make a decision, they prevaricate. They try to put themselves at the mercy of changing circumstances. They say things like, ‘I wanted to do this but I wasn’t able to. In the end, the situationt mean that I had to do that.’ No such easy opt-out is available for you this weekend. You’ve got to fight for the result you want, and create the outcome that you most yearn to see. That may require a lot of determination and an almost heroic attitude.
– Jonathan Cainer, Taurus, Friday, 18 November 2011

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
– Thomas Mann, 1875 – 1955

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 – 1941

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
– Blaise Pascal, 1623 – 1662

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

“The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.”
– Paul Graham

Many of our fears are tissue paper thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

Tis the reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 – 1882

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, Not because they never found it, But because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.
– William Feather, 1889 – 1981

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
— A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

“When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content. The best people are the ones that understand content. They are a pain in the butt to manage but you put up with it because they are so good at content.”
– Steve Jobs

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.
– Ann Landers, 1918 – 2002

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.
– Thomas Merton, 1915 – 1968

I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.
-William Blake, 1757 – 1827

You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.
-William Blake, 1757 – 1827

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
-William Blake, 1757 – 1827

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
-William Blake, 1757 – 1827

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.
– Michel de Montaigne, 1533 – 1592

The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man’s taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.
– Robert Benchley, 1889 – 1945

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
– Orson Welles, 1915 – 1985

If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
– Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1884 – 1980

It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.
– Henry Ward Beecher, 1813 – 1887

What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749 – 1832

What your heart thinks is great, is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 – 1882

Even though it runs counter to popular belief, Life’s critical decisions are usually made in the heart and only later ratified by the brain.
– Mardy Grothe

The heart is forever making the head its fool.
– François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, 1613 – 1680

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
– Thomas Carlyle, 1795 – 1881

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
– Thomas Carlyle, 1795 – 1881

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
– Abraham Maslow, 1908 – 1970

Why do we think technology is above morality? … The real question is, ‘How should I conduct my life?’ rather than ‘What tools should I use?’.
– Neil Postman, 1931 – 2003

Never mind trifles. In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807 – 1882

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
– Steven Wright

If the pen is mightier than the sword, in a duel I’ll let you have the pen!
– Steven Wright

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.
– Steven Wright

“I keep six serving men,
(they taught me all I knew),
their names are What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who.”
– Rudyard Kipling

Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.
– Golo Mann, 1909 – 1994

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
– Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1883 – 1955

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero! (Seize the day, put little trust in tomorrow!)
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself.
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

Excellence when concealed, differs but little from buried worthlessness.
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

Patience makes lighter what sorrow may not heal.
– Horace, 65 – 8 BC

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
– Theodore H. White

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them.
– Rabindranath Tagore

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore

It is curious – curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
– Mark Twain

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
– Rollo May

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
– Joseph Campbell

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918 – 2008

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.
– Max Frisch, 1911 – 1991

Science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life.
– Will Durant, 1885 – 1981

I try to look on the upside. If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice: once in your mind and once when it happens. Deal with it once, then move on.
– Jimmy Carr

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.
– Heinrich Heine

Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid it will never begin.
– Grace Hansen

Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.
– Janis Joplin, 1943 – 1970

If you don’t like something change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.
– Maya Angelou

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams. Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they’re still there.
– Erma Bombeck, 1927 – 1996

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets – they’re more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
– May Sarton, 1912 – 1995

When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
– Oscar Wilde, 1854 – 1900

Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought.
– Amos Bronson Alcott, 1799 – 1888

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
– Agnes de Mille, 1905 – 1993

?”We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a new life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up.”
– Rilke

We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.
– Laertius Diogenes

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward vision.
– Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 1090 – 1153

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.
– Omar Khayyám, 1048 – 1131

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
– Neil Gaiman

I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among those without dreams and desires.
– Kahlil Gibran, 1883 – 1931

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
– Napoleon Hill, 1883 – 1970

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there
– Willa Cather, 1873 – 1947

It is with our passions as it is with fire and water, they are good servants, but bad masters.
– Aesop

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.
– Douglas William Jerrold, 1803 – 1857

Next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
– Stephen Hawking

To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.
– Elizabeth Bibesco, 1897 – 1945

?”Behaviour is the mirror in which everyone shows their image”
– Goethe

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
– Martin Luther King Jr

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
– Barbara Kingsolver

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail
– John Donne

This is not about the success of one business or failure. This is about the success of you.
– James Altucher

Keep the other person’s well being in mind when you feel an attack of soul-purging truth coming on.
– Betty White

There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill-will.
– Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929 – 1968

?”Time Heals What Reason Cannot”
– Seneca

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
—Albert Einstein

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
– Francis Bacon, 1561 – 1626

“The time has come to turn your heart into a temple of fire.”
– Rumi

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896 – 1940

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
– Galileo Galilei, 1564 – 1642

Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.
– Herodotus

“If you make stuff, it will be difficult to make money. If you move it or market it, you’ll be fine.”
– BBC website Davos quote http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/business-16759970

“Always go for the decision that makes a better story.”
– Anon reddit comment

“The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love. Chained by his certitude, he is a slave; he has forfeited his freedom. Only the person who risks is truly free.”
? Leo Buscaglia

I use the “three-day rule.” If you don’t think you’ll care about something in three days, don’t waste time caring about it now.
– Anon reddit comment

Today is the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be again. Try not to waste it.
– Anon reddit comment

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
– Thomas Aquinas, 1225 – 1274

Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharp and efficient tool. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see.
– Bernard Baruch, 1870 – 1965

Often, rather than tackle a daunting, difficult task we allow ourselves to become obsessed by some comparative irrelevance. We gain more satisfaction from sorting out something small than from peering into the abyss of an apparent impossibility.
– Jonathan Cainer 07/02/2012

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
– Charles Dickens, 1812 – 1870

The stateliest building man can raise is the ivy’s food at last.
– Charles Dickens, 1812 – 1870

It would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
– Charles Dickens, 1812 – 1870

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink, and somebody to love you.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

I am a drinker with a writing problem.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.
– Brendan Behan, 1923 – 1964

What light is to the eyes, what air is to the lungs, what love is to the heart; liberty is to the soul of man.
– Robert Green Ingersoll, 1833 – 1899

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.
– Emo Phillips

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles
– Mark Twain

A man is least himself when he speaks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth
– Wilde, in Dorian Gray.
[“give a man a mask and he’ll show his true face”]

I should be much more worried that I’ll straightjacket myself with fear. That the real thing to fear is doing the same thing, forever.
– Amy Hoy

“There are more things that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
– Seneca

Not only anxious thoughts, but also resentment, grievances, pointless complaining, guilt and regret, criticism of self and others, perpetual discontent…… are ways in which we unconsciously create suffering for ourselves. They arise in imagination (the mind). We need to recognize that these are all unnecessary baggage that brings a heaviness into our lives and strengthens a false sense of self. When you recognize their pointlessness, you can let go of them and then MOVE THROUGH LIFE WITHOUT UNNECESSARY BAGGAGE, enjoying the present moment, including its challenges. And so the present moment becomes your friend, and you begin to experience life as supportive, rather than hostile. This is the miracle of transformation.
– Eckhart Tolle

If you love something set it free, but don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.
– Chuck Palahniuk

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
– Ernest Hemingway

Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I’ve ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
– Billy Madison

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”
– Carl Sagan

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
– Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
– Carl Sagan

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
– Carl Sagan

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
– Carl Sagan

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
– Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
– Carl Sagan

“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
? Neil deGrasse Tyson

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
? Dr. Seuss

“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.”
-Jordan Belfort

“I find a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced by whether or not I have bread.”
– Mitch Hedberg

I used to be into sadism, necrophilia, and bestiality, but after a while I realized I was just flogging a dead horse.
– Anon

If I agreed with you we’d both be wrong.
– Anon

And then there was the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really is a dog.
– Anon

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
– Elie Wiesel

Rather than ‘love at first sight’, one should say, They look promising and I’ll know properly in about 20 years time…
– Alain de Botton

Shallowness usually results from a reluctance to feel sad enough about stuff.
– Alain de Botton

The ideal lover: someone who corrects the biases of one’s own personality.
– Alain de Botton

The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness
– Alain de Botton

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
– Krishnamurti

If you’re not helping each other to become better people, then there’s no point in being together
-Anon

“Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.”
– Winston Churchill

The desire to be loved ‘for who we are’ crashes against the reality of who we are, which is inevitably not entirely pretty.
– Alain de Botton ?

More clearly than elsewhere, one sees in sex that the imperative to assert power is fuelled by a sense of not being very powerful.
– Alain de Botton ?

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.
– Neil Gaiman

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
– Benjamin Franklin

“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”
– Dorothy Parker

“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
– CS Lewis

‘It is difference that is the difference that makes the difference’
– Gregory Bateson

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

? Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

I’m trying to see things from your point of view, but i can’t stick my head that far up my own arse.
– Anon

6 specks of dust inside Waterloo Station represent-or rather over-represent-the extent to which space is crowded with stars
– Sir James Jeans

When the winds of change blow, some build walls and others build windmills.
– Chinese proverb

Only the shallow know themselves.
– Oscar Wilde

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
– Mark Twain

‘I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.’
– Florence Nightingale

“Your perception of yourself has an enormous impact on how others perceive you.”
– Erin Falconer

“If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.”
– Author Unknown

“I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question.”
– Harun Yahya

What are you questioning this weekend? How far ahead of your time are you? Don’t assume you are wrong just because others cannot see how right you are.
– Jonathan Cainer

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
– Ecclesiastes 1:18

“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”
– Thomas Gray

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Marianne Williamson

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not…what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for
– Epicurus

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”
– Dalai Lama

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
– Aesop

“Everyone make mistakes, but if you make the same mistake twice, it’s no longer a mistake, it’s a choice.”
– Unknown

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
– Carl Sandburg, 1878 – 1967

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
– Virginia Woolf, 1882 – 1941

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
– Buddha.

“Race is just a pigment of the imagination”
– Glen Highland

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
– Aristotle

“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”
– Dr. Linus Pauling

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away”
– Dr. Linus Pauling

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
? Aldous Huxley

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness…
– Alain de Botton

‘Freedom of speech’ obscures difference between what you can say in theory – and what you can say and retain any friends.
– Alain de Botton

“My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand”
– Thich Nhat Hanh

You’re not stuck in traffic; you are traffic.
– Anon

People should be taught how to think, not what to think.
– Anon

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
– Hanlon’s Razor

“We’re never so vulnerable as when we trust someone. But paradoxically if we cannot trust neither can we find love or joy”
– Walter Anderson

Your perception does not equal reality.
Heady.

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life – so dutifully stayed and did just that.
– Alain de Botton ?

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
– Alain de Botton ?

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
– Alain de Botton ?

“Don’t blindly believe what I say. Don’t believe me because others convince you of my words. Don’t believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. Don’t rely on logic alone, nor speculation. Don’t infer or be deceived by appearances.”

“Do not give up your authority and follow blindly the will of others. This way will lead to only delusion.”

“Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real. Discover that there are virtuous things and there are non-virtuous things. Once you have discovered for yourself give up the bad and embrace the good.”
– The Buddha

It’s liberating to recognise that pessimism never protected anyone from disasters.
– Alain de Botton

‘Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.’
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You were once the youngest person on earth.
– Anon

“If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.”
– Epicurus

“The grass is greener where you water it.”
– Anon

If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.
– Joe Rogan

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
-Lao Tzu

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
– Alain de Botton

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
– Oscar Wilde

You learn a lot wondering who you’d date if magically transposed into a heterosexual member of the opposite sex.
– Alain de Botton

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. … The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you.”
? Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger.”
– Carl Sagan (describing the Nuclear arms race 1983)

If you have a dilemma, do the thing that moves you forward. If this is the scarier proposition. All the better.

You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.
Isabel Allende

Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.
– Woody Allen

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
– Charles Bukowski

People buy what they think they need, not what you think they need.
– William Pietri

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts
Winston Churchill

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
– George Orwell

“Control is just a button on a keyboard”
– Deepandmeaningless

“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.”
– Eric Sevareid

“Do not complain about growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.”
– Mark Twain

Because we can reason, doesn’t mean there is one.
– John P. Morgan

“There are unknowable forces in this universe that I’ll never understand, and none of us will ever fully understand, and I hold these forces in great reverence, and to that degree I am religious.”
– Albert Einstein

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
? Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

All we ever truly have, is the state we are in… at any given moment. And I added how it makes sense, therefore, to remain mindful and choose a desirable state
– Lisa Ames (or Lisa White)

Given enough time, hydrogen starts to wonder where it came from, and where it is going.
– Anon

Loneliness isn’t a craving for just being with other people. It’s a craving for a kind of meaningful connection with other people. Without a meaningful connection, being with people can be a chore and it doesn’t help much for alleviating loneliness.
– Anon

“Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”
Sir Francis Bacon

“The mirror is a worthless invention. The only way to truly see yourself is in the reflection of someone else’s eyes.”
– Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
– Rumi

Would you like to know one of the most dangerous phrases in the language? It is the one that goes, ‘I will be happy if…’ Every time we utter such a comment, we make ourselves into a hostage to fortune. It hardly matters what you are hoping for, the fact that you will be ‘happy if’ implies that you will be unhappy ‘if not’. We must always take care not to let our happiness be dependent on any development. Priority number one for you this week, is to allow yourself to be happy, regardless of how things turn out.
– Jonathan Cainer

You know what they say – “Expectation is the root of all heartache” … “Expectations are resentments under construction” …
Think about it — How much of your frustration, disappointment, anger, irritation, comes from your expectations differing from how things really turned out.
We create expectations in our heads of what other people should do, what our lives should be like, how other people should behave … and if we are let down, we become resentful.
Think about the opposite scenario however – having no expectations, and being surprised on the upside! Imagine how wonderful it is to receive flowers when you are not expecting them! Live your life without expectation, live with acceptance that the present moment is perfect – is just as it should be. That way, when good things come your way, you will always be pleasantly surprised.

‘I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path.’ ~Dalai Lama

Where there’s an attention seeking partner, an attention denying partner can’t be far behind – and vice versa.
– Alain de Botton

An intuition: the unconscious mind has reasons the conscious part still has to catch up with.
– Alain de Botton

Nagging: a complaint that takes itself insufficiently seriously.
– Alain de Botton

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
– Alain de Botton

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
– Alain de Botton

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
– Alain de Botton

At every new stage of parenting, the worries of the previous stage appear madly exaggerated
– Alain de Botton

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
– Alain de Botton

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
– Alain de Botton

We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves for resisting temptations we never felt in the first place.
– Alain de Botton

Real love is knowing someone’s weaknesses and not taking advantage of them. Knowing their flaws and accepting who they are.
– Anon

It’s our choices that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities
– J.K. Rowling

Reverse your projections. Every time you see yourself complaining about other groups or other people, stop yourself and think: “is it possible, is there any way, that someone out there might be making the same complaints about me?”
– http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis

Your perception of me is a reflection of you; my reaction to you is an awareness of me
– Anon

You need to be healthy also. And not just physical health. But emotional healthy. Mental health (your idea muscle must be exercised every day) and Spiritual health (cultivating a sense of surrender to your current situation, feeling gratitude to the abundance both inside and outside of you).
– James Altucher

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
– Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
? Albert Einstein

“The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits.”
? Albert Einstein

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
? Albert Einstein

“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”
? Albert Einstein

“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
? Albert Einstein

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
? Albert Einstein

“Never memorize something that you can look up.”
? Albert Einstein

“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”
? Albert Einstein

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning.”
? Albert Einstein

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling 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

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
? Albert Einstein

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
? Albert Einstein

“Love is a better master than duty.”
? Albert Einstein

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
? Albert Einstein

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
? Albert Einstein

“We all know that light travels faster than sound. That’s why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.”
? Albert Einstein

“A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.”
? Albert Einstein

“You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”
? Albert Einstein

“What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.”
? Albert Einstein

“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”
? Albert Einstein

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
? Albert Einstein

“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
? Albert Einstein

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”
? Albert Einstein

“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”
? Albert Einstein

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
? Albert Einstein

“Past is dead
Future is uncertain;
Present is all you have,
So eat, drink and live merry.”
? Albert Einstein

“The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.”
? Albert Einstein

“Information is not knowledge.”
? Albert Einstein

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
? Albert Einstein

“People don’t listen, they just wait for their turn to talk.”
— Chuck Palahniuk

The only decent bone in her body was mine.
– Ernest Hemingway

A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said ‘I love your pictures – they’re wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.’ He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: ‘That was a wonderful dinner; you must hava a terrific stove.’
– Sam Haskins

I think it very important never to confuse psychology or literature with photography. This is why I wouldn’t dream of trying to explain my work. Thus my pictures are quite simple: me, thinking in images.
– Sam Haskins

Do what you love to do. Do what you want to do. You don’t need permission to write a book or start a business or take a risk or ask out the most unattainable person in your circle of friends.

There are no gatekeepers in life, preventing you from doing what you want to do. You are your only gatekeeper. You are your only prison warden.

You can choose yourself to do anything. You might not be good at it at first but if you study your failures you will get better. You will keep choosing yourself. Finally you will choose yourself for success. And finally you won’t need to choose yourself anymore. Things will just happen.
– James Altucher [http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/10/what-you-can-do-if-you-are-a-nobody/]

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
? Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The most importants things are the hardest to say because words diminish their meaning.”
– Stephen King, The Body

“My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.”
– Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
“It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter

All murderers are punished except for those that kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
– Voltaire

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
– Charles Bukowski

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness”
– Jonathan Safran Foer

War does not determine who is right, only who is left
– Bertrand Russell.

“When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.”
– Honore de Balzac

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
– Emma Goldman

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way.”
– Søren Kierkegaard

My ex-girlfriend had a really weird fetish, where she used to dress up like herself and act like a fucking bitch all the time.
– Bo Burnham

Only dead fish go with the flow.
– Andy Hunt

“And I don’t get why he was the Great Gatsby. He didn’t do that much with his life. Maybe I can see him being the Alright Gatsby.”
-KP

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live”
– George Carlin

“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
– Buddha

Often in families, each parent gets on best with the child who is least like them – and most like their partner.
– Alain de Botton

Previous generations messed up kids through harshness, neglect. This one: through perfectionist over-attentiveness and ‘kindness’.
– Alain de Botton

The best guide to parenting: to ask oneself constantly: What would you want/need if you were that child?
– Alain de Botton

‘Charming’ people: their twisted, dangerous inability to let even one or two people get away without thinking them terrific.
– Alain de Botton

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life – so he stayed, and did just that.
– Alain de Botton

You get a true sense of your age not from the people you fancy, but of those who start to fancy you.
– Alain de Botton

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
– Alain de Botton

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to observe them at work in another person.
– Alain de Botton

When trying to decode weird behaviour of others, think of the simple explanations and basic emotions: fear, envy, guilt…
– Alain de Botton

Hard to pass through Arrivals without an irrational hope that someone significant has come to surprise one on the other side.
– Alain de Botton

Some people have to go home to be treated nicely – others have to go to work.
– Alain de Botton

Aphorisms: provocative, exaggerated sentences that overstate their case as a way of flushing out occasional truths.
– Alain de Botton

Marriage isn’t a vow to stop being interested in other people; more about how to handle that interest.
– Alain de Botton

It should be taken as an alarming sign just how happy married couples are when friends join them in their condition.
– Alain de Botton

How we feel about ‘the nature of existence’ is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.
– Alain de Botton

It’s too easy and reassuring just to settle on feeling misunderstood.
– Alain de Botton

Rather than feeling guilt, people who have hurt us typically start to hate us – for reminding them of their own meanness.
– Alain de Botton

Honest evaluation never has to involve meanness: nastiness and criticism are logically entirely distinct.
– Alain de Botton

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
– Alain de Botton

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different”
– C.S. Lewis

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
– Mark Twain

Why should you be sad? You lost someone who didn’t want to be with you. She lost someone who loved her.
– Anon

“I don’t know why people say grow some balls. Balls are weak. Grow a vagina. Now those can take a pounding.”
– Betty White

“What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?”
– Haruki Murakami

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
– Robert Ardrey

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know
– Ernest Hemingway

“There are seven things that will destroy us: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, religion without sacrifice, politics without principal, science without humanity, and business without ethics.”
– Gandhi

“The only ‘normal’ people are those you don’t know very well.”
– Joe Ancis

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
– Dorothy Parker

We accept the love we think we deserve.
– Stephen Chbosky

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others
– Marianne Williamson

I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken – the choosing was not. You have to move on.
– Stephen Sondheim

“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”
– Dorothy Parker

Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see the greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.
– Edmund Lee

‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can do it, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.’
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Close some doors today. not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they lead you nowhere”
– Paulo Coelho

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
? Paulo Coelho

?”Being who we are requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship.”
– Harriet Lerner

I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.
– Sylvia Plath

Procrastination is a lot like masturbation, it feels good when you do it but in the end you’re only fucking yourself.
– Anon

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
– Raylan Givens

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
– Alain de Botton

Most relationship problems condensed: someone is standing too close, someone is standing too far.
– Alain de Botton

‘Wasting time’ is mostly just fear.
– Alain de Botton

Reckless modern hopes of love: one person who spares us the need for anyone else.
– Alain de Botton

There’s no such thing as that bogeyman ‘thinking too much.’ There’s only thinking badly.
– Alain de Botton

“If it doesn’t fit, you’re not shoving hard enough.”
– Ken Kocienda

To those who call for yearly no-fault renegotiations of marriage: the irrational symptom of love is the insistence it must/will be forever.
– Alain de Botton

If more people thought for themselves, a good reputation would be far less important.
– Alain de Botton

Injustice to thinkers: sitting on sofa, gazing blankly, not helping unload dishwasher, likely to be dismissed as ‘doing nothing’.
– Alain de Botton

The most unfair domestic arguments start as a disappointment seeking a target: the Nearest Human Standing phenomenon.
– Alain de Botton

We continue to kill those who kill others, because killing is wrong.
– Unknown

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

–W. H. Auden

?”What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.”
? Rohinton Mistry

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened
— Terry Pratchett

Murderers! Stop murdering. Everyone will die eventually. Just sit down and be patient.
— Russell Brand

You must know for yourself, directly, the truth of yourself and you cannot realize it through another, however great. There is no authority that can reveal it.
You yourself have to be the master and the pupil. The moment you acknowledge another as a master and yourself as a pupil, you are denying truth. There is no master, no pupil, in the search for truth.
You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything.
– Krishnamurti

You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.”
– Robert Brault

Act as if you’re already loved, safe and secure. You matter to people.
– Kuldeep Brar

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a shaman or medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions.
When did you stop dancing?
When did you stop singing?
When did you stop being enchanted by stories?
When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?
– Gabrielle Roth

“Take the drama down a notch there Juliet”
-Harvey Specter, Suits TV show

I will ignore you so hard you will start to doubt your own existence.
– Anon

I’m not saying I hate you, I’m just saying that if you got hit by a bus, I would be driving that bus.
– Anon

If at first you don’t succeed, I won’t be surprised.
– Anon

If you are honest, truthful, and transparent, people trust you. If people trust you, you have no grounds for fear, suspicion or jealousy.
– Dalai Lama ?

“If you see certainty in that which is uncertain, you are bound to suffer”
– Ajahn Chah

“Re exes: never trust what you feel now, only what you knew then.”
– Alain de Botton

Paradox of the sulk: ‘If I have to spell this out to you, you’re not someone I want to be understood by.’
– Alain de Botton

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
– Alain de Botton

So long as we continue to have such trouble telling each other what we really feel, there’ll be room for literature.
– Alain de Botton

‘Wasting time’ is usually terror, not laziness.
– Alain de Botton

The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
– Alain de Botton

Regret is the price we pay for choice.
– Alain de Botton

Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
– Alain de Botton ?

The problem with sharing one’s crises with friends is: you move on. And they consider you a patient for eternity.
– Alain de Botton ?

We are universally deviant—but only in relation to some highly distorted ideals of normality.
– Alain de Botton ?

The receiving end of passive aggression: all the pain of a punch, with the confusion of not knowing one has even been hit.
– Alain de Botton ?

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have helped/rescued our parents.
– Alain de Botton ?

To protect the population, divorces should only be granted to those who can show a total understanding of why it really went wrong.
– Alain de Botton ?

“You learn so much by daring to explore what it would feel like to believe the opposite of what one does.”
– Alain de Botton ?

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
– Alain de Botton ?

Failure is potential without any more time.
– Alain de Botton ?

An aloof indifferent manner can just be a desire to be liked that proved so overwhelming and intense it curdled into detachment.
– Alain de Botton ?

Shyness/social awkwardness: an inability to be oneself stemming from a disbelief that other people might at heart be very much like us.
– Alain de Botton

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, kinds of sky, smells, textures of carpet…
– Alain de Botton

Because life so often seems incomprehensible, books one hardly understands can seem closer to the mark than those one can.
– Alain de Botton

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we’re reading it at the right moment for us.
– Alain de Botton

Human beings are inherently bad. You will hear a lot of people roll their eyes at this sentiment, and continue championing people, and express such shock at the atrocious acts that humankind commits, but do not be swayed: People suck. This means that, when you find truly honest, generous, kind people, stick with them. Befriend them. Marry one. Because finding someone you can trust and count on is still the greatest asset you can have, in any generation.
– Anon

This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem disguised as a security problem.
– Joe Rogan

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
– Robert Frost

(Loneliness)is a “debilitating psychological condition characterised by a deep sense of emptiness, worthlessness, lack of control and personal threat”.
– John Cacioppo

If you’re sad about being alone on Valentine’s Day, just remember.. Nobody loves you on the other days of the year either.
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@verygrumpycat

Try saying “I like cops” without your lips touching.
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@verygrumpycat

?’Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’
– Abraham Lincoln

Congratulations on your ability to create drama out of absolutely nothing.
– Very Grumpy Cat

Some days you win. Some days you learn.
– Dr Brooke Magnanti ?

It’s called fuck off and it’s located over there.
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@VeryGrumpyCat

Big girls don’t cry… They eat.
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@VeryGrumpyCat

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

Your true self, in part you discover, in part you create
– Julian Baggini

Love is made in the gritty ups and downs of being with someone who is as flawed as you.
– Mark vernon

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.”
– Alan Watts

Beauty is a light in the heart
– Kahlil Gibran

Twinkle twinkle little star, I want to hit you with my car.
– Very Grumpy Cat @VeryGrumpyCat

I had the impression it wasn’t night or day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.
– Sylvia Plath ?

Want to know what living in a police state looks like? Travel through an airport…
– Anon

I put the pro in procrastinating
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@VeryGrumpyCat

Katherine wanted to hold the moment, capture it for eternity. She’d never felt more herself; doing and being as one. Watching as her breath rose in front of her, still for the briefest of moments, ephemeral, impermanent, empty, and then it was gone.
– deepandmeaningless

How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?
– Sylvia Plath ?@itssylviaplath

You don’t need anyone’s permission, not even your own mind’s, to live a life full of the things that matter to you. Happiness is not the absence of pain, but rather the willingness to ride out the painful bits in order to live the life you want.
– SuckyBoyfriend Reddit

I once took the pee out of a pirate. He was furious!
– cluedont @cluedont

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely”
– Milan Kundera

‘If I had a dollar for every time I thought about you, I would start thinking about you.”
– Very Grumpy Cat ?@VeryGrumpyCat

“We met for a reason, either you’re a blessing or a lesson”
– Frank Ocean

There is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness with a human being who believes in the same basic principles.
– Sylvia Plath ?@itssylviaplath

Dyslexia is a right pain in the ears.
– James Martin ?@pundementalism

“Worry is the interest paid on trouble before it is even due”
– William Ralph Inge

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
– General George Smith Patton, Jr.

?”Money is a result, wealth is a result, health is a result, illness is a result, your weight is a result. We live in a world of cause and effect.”
– T. Harv Eker

It may be, it does not exist to be found, but instead, to be created. And that you can create it.
– DeepandMeaningless

“You’re all flash and no pan”.
– DeepandMeaningless

All I have ever touched or said to others becomes only the rehearsal for you, and preserved only for this.
– Sylvia Plath ?@itssylviaplath

Stop making excuses. Excuses are blocks of stones which Fools build monuments of nothing.
– Mr. T

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable: they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“If you can’t ignore an insult, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh it off; and if you can’t laugh it off, it’s probably deserved.”
– J.R Lynes

Don’t borrow sorrow from tomorrow.
– Sophie Heawood

“Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.After that, who cares? He’s a mile away and you’ve got his shoes!”
– Billy Connolly

“I just walked a mile in your shoes to see what you’re really like. Turns out you’re out of shape.”
– Sundeep Sidhu

A head full of fears has no space for dreams.
– Anonymous

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
– Lao Tzu

There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.
– John Ruskin

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
– Isaac Asimov

“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
? A.A. Milne

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
— Pooh’s Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

“Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”
? A.A. Milne

“The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
? A.A. Milne

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
? A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Think it over, think it under.”
? A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.”
? A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

If it takes more effort to complain about something than fix it, just frigging fix it.
– Jeff Atwood

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness!
– Rich Guzzi

To end an argument, explain to counterparty THEIR position until they agree you understand it. Then make them do same with your position.
– Joel Spolsky

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
– Albert Einstein

Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

Only by investing and speaking your vision with passion can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
– Søren Kierkegaard, 1813 – 1855

A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
– Charles F. Kettering, 1876 – 1958

“I told them I wanted to be a comedian, and they laughed; I became a comedian, no one’s laughing now”
– Bob Monkhouse

Procrastination: working tomorrow for a better today.
– Anon

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
– Groucho Marx

“Women should be obscene and not heard.”
– Groucho Marx

“How do you feel about women’s rights ? I like either side of them.”
– Groucho Marx

I don’t mean to brag, but I’m 2 girls away from a threesome.
– Anon

“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
– Mark Twain

Whiteboards are remarkable.
– Anon

A relationship is like a fart. If you have to force it, it’s probably shit.
– Anon

If I agreed with you we’d both be wrong.
– Anon

Like a blind man at an orgy, I was gonna have to feel things out.
Like a midget at a urinal, I needed to stay on my toes.
– Anon

I’m good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y
– Anon

When life gives you melons… you may have dyslexia
– Anon

There are two types of people, those who can extrapolate from incomplete data…
– Anon

If life gives you lemons, sell lemons. You got them free, so will make a profit without the laborious process of making lemonade.
– James Martin

She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions, and in the end doing them irreparable harm.
– Marcia Muller

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
– Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune

Ne te quaesiveris extra
(Ne te quaesiveris extra: Latin, meaning “Do not seek outside yourself.”)

How I worship at my own altar since I know that she loves me!
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Eighty percent of success is showing up
– Woody Allen

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it
– Bill Cosby

Beware the barrenness of a busy life
– Socrates

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent
– Thomas Jefferson

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,
The pangs of disprized Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the Spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons
Be all my sins remembered
– William Shakespeare

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul
– George Bernard Shaw

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus
– Mark Twain

Thought forms in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air
– Joseph Joubert

He is not a lover who does not love forever
– Euripides

There is far more opportunity than there is ability
– Thomas Edison

Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I’d decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.
– Donald E. Westlake, 1933 – 2008

I always say that the realities of life are the flour and eggs and vanilla a playwright puts into the cake that she’s baking. And when it’s all finished, who can taste the flour and eggs and vanilla anymore? It’s all about the cake itself.
– Sharon Pollock

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
– Nora Ephron, 1941 – 2012