If something anticipated arrives too late, it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel, nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.
Dorothy Gilman


To manipulate someone, shows how little you respect them.
Unknown

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

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
Malcolm Gladwell

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Margaret Mead

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
Henry L. Stimson (1867 - 1950)

We're a sentimental people. We like a few kind words better than millions of dollars given in a humiliating way.
Gamal Abdel Nasser

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
Irish Proverb

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G. K. Chesterton

One's first step in wisdom is to question everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains.
Mary Pettibone Poole

Beware so long as you live, of judging people by appearances.
La Fontaine

Act as if it were impossible to fail.
Dorothea Brande

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
Leonardo da Vinci

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.
Margaret Fuller

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

For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes.
Dag Hammarskjold

There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.
Jawaharlal Nehru

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Charles Darwin

But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
Lois McMaster Bujold

Personally I have struggled massively with the dilemma of talent vs desire. Choosing desire may not always be the easiest thing to do. It may seem a waste to leave those natural talents behind and strike out in a new direction. But at least youíll feel alive.
Meri Williams

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
Abraham Lincoln

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

Question how much freedom your path affords you. Be utterly ruthless about it. It's your freedom that will get you to where you want to go.
Hugh Macleod

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles Du Bos

It's takin' whatever comes your way, the good AND the bad, that give life flavor. It's all the stuff rolled together that makes life worth livin'.
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
Walt Whitman

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough.
Frank Crane

When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.
Nicole Kidman

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.
Archibald MacLeish

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.
W. Somerset Maugham

Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything.
Harry S Truman

Sometimes we do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions not answers.
John Le Carre

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.
Milan Kundera

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Henry Van Dyke

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship.
Colette

A man does not insist on physical beauty in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realizes that she is beautiful - he just hadn't noticed it at first.
from Time Enough For Love, by Robert Heinlein

The man who has confidence in himself gains the confidence of others.
Hasidic Saying

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson

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 other's 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

Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
Elbert Hubbard
US author  (1856 - 1915)

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
Robert Fritz

 True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.
Cyrus H. Curtis

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
Whitney Young

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.
W. Somerset Maugham

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
Aeschylus.
Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)

"He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure. Their every thought is allied with power, and all obstacles are bravely met and wisely overcome."
James Allen

Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.
Sholem Asch

Believe nothing against another but on good authority; and never report what may hurt another, unless it be a greater hurt to some other to conceal it.
William Penn

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
Henry L. Stimson

Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Carlos Castaneda

(Norm's note: He is correct  about the ease and reasons in which we are offended. But it is not self importance, but feeling superiour that causes our anguish. Without self importance, how can we have self respect? If man is God's perfect reflection, is it not disrespecting God to not have self importance?
This kind of muddled thinking also causes much anguish.)

 I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.
Socrates

People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future.
Chuck Palahniuk

Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble.
Frank Tyger

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.
John Burroughs

Wanting to be someone you're not is a waste of the person you are.
Kurt Cobain

Never does the human soul appear so strong and noble as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.
Edward Chapin

The most important thing is to be whatever you are without shame.
Rod Steiger

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said.
Vaclav Havel

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.
Abraham Lincoln

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself'.
Albert Einstein

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
Harold Bloom

My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks. I will not resign myself...
Trieu Thi Trinh

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

[Medicine is] a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

If you're creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you now more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn't the case.
Hugh Macleod

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
George Eliot

Believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.
W. E. B. Du Bois

Great people and great athletes realize early in their lives their destiny, and accept it. Even if they do not consciously realize the how, the where, the what.
Percy Cerutty

Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible - not to have run away.
Dag Hammarskjold (1905 - 1961)

To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.
Suzanne Gordon, Lonely in America, 1976

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.
Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - ), "A Wreath of Roses"

Forgiveness is one of the many horrible side effects of loving someone.
Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive, 12-29-05

The meek shall inherit the earth? Well... I don't think so. If by meek you mean friendly and introverted, okay maybe, but if by meek you mean unwilling to take a chance, then never. If I was a betting man and I had to wager on who I thought would inherit the earth, my money would be on the curious.
Jim Coudal, Keynote Speech, SXSW 2006

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