Ideas - Quotes

The air is full of ideas. They are knocking you in the head all the time. You only have to know what you want, then forget it and go about your business. Suddenly the idea will come through. It was there all the time. - Henry Ford

The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds. - John C. Maxwell

The critical ingredient is getting off your rear end and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. - Nolan Bushnell

The idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It's a jungle out there ... many ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive. - Bernard Beckett

The ideas of things precede and lead to their creation. - Christian Nestell Bovee

The man with a new idea is a crank – until the idea succeeds. - Mark Twain

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. It we watch ourselves honestly, we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. - Wilfred Trotter

The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas. - J. P. Guilford

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change. - Howard Zinn

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good. - Charles F. Kettering

The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction. - Michael Eisner

Writing - Quotes

Writing the first chapter can feel like you're trying to artificially inseminate a stampeding mastodon with one hand duct taped to your leg. That's okay. That's normal. Do it and get through it. - Chuck Wendig You become a serious novelist by living long enough. - Don Deilillo

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. - Doris Lessing

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It's just so easy to give up! - Octavia E. Butler

You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas. - Tobias Wolff

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes. - Anne Lamott

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist. - Isaac Asimov

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed. - Anita Brookner

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a labourer or as an artist. - Anne Lamott

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. - Meg Rosoff

Art - Quotes

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene. - John Barth

Every artist writes his own autobiography. - Havelock Ellis

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. - Oscar Wilde

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. - W. Somerset Maugham

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent – I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space. - Robert Fulghum

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. - H.P. Lovecraft

Good artists copy; great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso

Great art picks up where nature ends. - Marc Chagall

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. - Leo Tolstoy

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision. - Mary Oliver

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life. - Jean-Michel Basquiat

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. - John F. Kennedy

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way? - Fluke Greville

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose – one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it. - Christian Nestell

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. - Anais Nin

It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. - Michael Crichton

Truth - Quotes

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not shew the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle lights. - Francis Bacon

Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam. - Unknown

Truth is both arms and armour. - Edward Counsel

Truth is always hidden like a shadow in darkness. - Unknown

Truth is always strange – stranger than fiction. - George Byron

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. - Matthew Arnold

Truth sometimes like stab of cruel knife. - Charlie Chan

Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous. - Mencius

Truth wears an unchanging countenance. - Edward Counsel

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance. - W. Clement Stone

Truth will lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none. - Bishop Robert South

Truth will only make you unpopular. - Wolfgang Borchert

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light. - George Washington

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it. - H. L. Mencken

Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger. - Ursula K Le Guin

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

Truth, like good medicine, is oftentimes repugnant to our present feelings, but gives vigour afterwards. - Edward Counsel

Truth, like oil, will in time rise to surface. - Charlie Chan

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in its excess. - Walter Savage Landor

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured, but, like the sun, only for a time. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things. - Augustus Hare

Truths kindle light for truths. - Lucretius

Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes – never! - Mikhail Bulgakov

Humour / Meme

Work - Quotes

If the individual is narrowly concentrated on the goal, to the exclusion of other relevant aspects of the problem situation, he is often unable to achieve a solution. The creative thinker must stand sufficiently detached from his work. - Mary Henle

If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves. - Mark Twain

If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn't anything you can't do if you want to. - Jim Henson

If you don't find a way to do something as work that is fulfilling and enjoyable, then your life is going to be really sad. - Rudolph Fiuliani

If you love your work, if you enjoy it, you're already a success. - Jack Canfield

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

In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. - Warren Buffett

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about? - Henry David Thoreau

It is not work that kills; but no work and overwork. - Aldo Manuzio

It is useless work that darkens the heart. - Ursula K. Le Guin

It isn't the hours you put in your work that count, it's the work you put in the hours. - Evan Esar

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction. - Anne Frank

Many hands make light work. - John Heywood

Measure not the work until the day's out and the labour done. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Words - Quotes

Words are naught but wind, and the fairest promises like dreams that take flight with the morning. - Edouard Rene de Laboulaye

Words are never "only words"; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do. - Slavoj Zizek

Words are pegs to hang ideas on. - Henry Ward Beecher

Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble. - Yehuda Berg

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased. - Aeschylus

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one. - Adlai E. Stevenson Jr

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. - Aldous Huxley

Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. - Patrick Rothfuss

Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden – a secret language. - Robert Altman

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions. - Sigmund Freud

Words have no wings but they can fly a thousand miles. - Korean Proverb

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning. - Maya Angelou

Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind. - Samuel R. Delany

Time - Quotes

Time is like a handful of sand – the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers. - Unknown

Time is money. - Benjamin Franklin

Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float. - Margaret Atwood

Time is short. Seventy years in the eye of youthful fancy seems a vast and almost boundless space; but in the estimate of sage experience, and in the full view of eternity, they contract to a span and dwindle to a point. - John Thornton

Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos. - Philip Zimbardo

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires. - Charles Caleb Colton

Time is too short in this one life to be able to do everything, but it definitely is long enough at least to be able to develop the will to do anything and everything. - Sujit Lalwani

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. - Eckhart Tolle

Time matters because we are finite, because time is the medium in which we live our lives. - Philip Zimbardo

Time neither flies nor sleeps. It is flexible, plastic, ever changing. Spend two hours watching a movie curled up with your lover and time ceases to exist. Spend two hours waiting for your lover to come and time is the iron bars of a prison. - Chloe Thurlow

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise. - Miguel de Cervantes

Teach / Teaching - Quotes

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers. - Richard Bach

Life is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be a medium for that amazement. - Edward Blishen

More than half the work of teaching is that of helping the child to gain a full and clear expression of what it already knows imperfectly. It is to aid him to lift up into full sight, and to round out into plain and adequate sentences, the dim and fragmentary ideas and perceptions of childhood. - John Milton Gregory

Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives. - Andy Rooney

No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money. - Henry Adams

None can teach admirably if not loving his task. - Amos Bronson Alcott

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen. - Philip Wylie

One repays a teacher badly if one remains always only a student. - Friedrich Nietzsche

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it’s about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual. - Gordon Pask

Some of the world's best educators are grandparents. - Dr Charlie W. Shedd

Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around. - Helen Peters

Pain - Quotes

The pain you feel today is the strength you feel tomorrow. For every challenge encountered there is opportunity for growth. - Unknown

The pains of life serve, by contrast, to multiply enjoyment; they constitute the foil which sets off and heightens the flashing brightness of the gem. - Eliza Cook

The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it. They say that time heals all wounds, but we never live long enough to test that theory. - Jose Saramago

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain. - China Mieville

There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. - Fernando Pessoa

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain. - R. D. Laing

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. - Carl Jung

There is no tyrant as merciless as pain. - Stephen King

There is one pain I often feel, which you will never know. It is caused by the absence of you. - Anthony Hopkins

There is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne. - Jack London

To hurt is as human as to breathe. - J. K. Rowling

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering. - Paulo Coelho

We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. - Eleanor Roosevelt

We can’t escape pain; we can’t escape the essential nature of our lives. But we do have a choice. We can give in and relent, or we can fight, persevere, and create a life worth living, a noble life. Pain is a fact; our evaluation of it is a choice. - Jacob Held

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons. - Jim Rohn

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. - Kenji Miyazawa

We wince under little pains, but nature in us, through the excitement attendant upon them, braces us to endure with fortitude greater agonies. - Christian Nestell Bovee

When times are difficult, remind yourself that no pain comes to you without a purpose. - Unknown

When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change. - George Eliot

Wherefore groan and lament over pain? Be, rather, thankful for this one sign of life; for the dead suffer no pain, and lay figures are never chilled by frost. - Ivan Panin

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from over mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life. - Angelina Jolie

Without the possibility of pain, there can be no joy, no real love. - Angela Montenegro

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. - James Baldwin

Life - Quotes

It is astonishing how much more anxious people are to lengthen life than to improve it; and as misers often lose large sums of money in attempting to make more, so do hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander. - Charles Caleb Colton

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burns out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. - Jack London

Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and the awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breather in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heart-breaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful. - L. R. Knost

Our lives are waves that come up out of the ocean of eternity, break upon the beach of earth, and lapse back to the ocean of eternity. Some are sunlit, some run in storm and rain; one is a quiet ripple, another is a thunderous breaker; and once in many centuries comes a great tidal wave that sweeps over a continent; but all go back to the sea and lie equally level there. - Austin O’malley

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. - Susan B. Anthony

More on Life Here, and the book The Mystery of Life - a collection of quotes on and pertaining to life.

Humour / Meme

Nature - Quotes

Nature talks in symbols; he who lacks imagination cannot understand her. - Abraham Miller

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels. - Luigi Pirandello

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry. - Richard Tapestry

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. - Henry David Thoreau

Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil. - Anatole France

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know. - Michel Foucault

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. - Henry Adams

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. - William Shakespeare

Search out the wisdom of Nature, there is depth in all her doings. - Martin Farquhar Tupper

Some of nature's most exquisite handiwork is on a miniature scale, as anyone knows who has applied a magnifying glass to a snowflake. - Rachel Carson

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure. - D. H. Lawrence

The laws of nature are written deep in the folds and faults of the earth. By encouraging men to learn those laws one can lead them further to a knowledge of the author of all laws. - John Joseph Lynch

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble. - Blaise Pascal

The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge. - Oliver Goldsmith

The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works. - Albert Einstein

There is new life in the soil for every man. There is healing in the trees for tired minds and for our overburdened spirits, there is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Remember that nature is your great restorer. - Calvin Coolidge

There is something of the marvellous in all things of nature. - Aristotle

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. - Rachel Carson

Use Nature well and she will recompense thee well. - Edward Counsel

We can create a more beautiful nature by not touching it and by leaving it alone! - Mehmet Murat ildan

We cannot command nature except by obeying her. - Francis Bacon

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. - William Hazlett

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. - Werner Heisenberg

Your deepest roots are in nature.  No matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of life you lead, you remain irrevocably linked with the rest of creation. - Charles Cook

Money - Quotes

Stripped of ideals, mere money making is among the coarsest of occupations. - Lewis R. Korns

Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps, and banisheth men from their houses, and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil. - Sophocles

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. - Charles Dickens

The easiest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your pocket. - Unknown

The jingling of a fat purse always commands the world. - David Gerrold

The miser who clings to his money and will not give up any of it because of the pleasure which its possession affords him cannot have any of the material comforts of life. He lives in continual want and discomfort in spite of all his wealth. - James Allen

The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The person who doesn’t know where his next dollar is coming from usually doesn’t know where his last dollar went. - Unknown

The secret of the difficulties of those people who make a great deal of money, and yet are always in want of it, is this – they throw it away as soon as they get it on the first whim or extravagance that strikes them, and have nothing left to meet ordinary expenses or discharge old debts. - William Hazlitt

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some. - George Bernard Shaw

The wealthy seldom possess wealth: oftener they are possessed by it. - Ivan Panin

To despise money, one must have plenty of it. - Cesare Pavese

We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like. - Dave Ramsey

We insist that "money is the root of all evil," and behave as if it were the source of all good. - Charles Edward Jerningham

We teach children to save their money. As an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has value. But it is not positive; it does not lead the child into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save. - Henry Ford

Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich. - Tom Robbins

When it comes to money, you can't win. If you focus on making it, you're materialistic. If you try to but don't make any, you're a loser. If you make a lot and keep it, you're a miser. If you make it and spend it, you're a spendthrift. If you don't care about making it, you're unambitious. If you make a lot and still have it when you die, you're a fool – for trying to take it with you. The only way to really win with money is to hold it loosely – and be generous with it to accomplish things of value. - John C. Maxwell

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. - Voltaire

When we lavish our money we rob our heir; when we merely save it we rob ourselves. - Jean de La Bruyere

You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it. - Tennessee Williams

You must gain control over your money or the lack of it will forever control you. - Dave Ramsey

Luck - Quotes

Ill luck comes by pounds and goes away by ounces. - Italian Proverb

Ill luck upon ill luck and a stone for a pillow. - Spanish Proverb

Ill luck, you know, seldom comes alone. - Miguel de Cervantes

It's better to be lucky than wise. - English Proverb

It's hard to detect good luck – it looks so much like something you've earned. - Frank A. Clark

I've found that what most people call luck is often little more than raw talent combined with the ability to make the most of opportunities. - Timothy Zahn

Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish. - Ovid

Luck and ill luck are neighbours. - Norwegian Proverb

Luck can only get you so far. - J. K. Rowling

Luck is a discernible, if mysterious, pattern of influences on your life path. - David Daniel Kennedy

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. - Ray Kroe

Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours. From such masterful spirits she turns away. But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need. - P. G. Wodehouse

Luck is a precious commodity. There's only so much to go around. And even if you do have a good-luck streak, some balancing bad luck is right around the corner. Just ask any honest gambler. - Caprice Crane

Luck is a word the bitter teach to the ignorant. - Steve Maraboli

Luck is an accident that happens to the competent. - Albert M Greenfield

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it. - Vera Nazarian

Luck is simply the advantage a true warrior gains in executing the correct course of action. - R. A. Salvatore

Luck is the residue of design. - Branch Rickey

Luck knows no limits. - Seneca

Luck lies in bed, and wishes the postman would bring him news of a legacy; labour turns out at six, and with busy pen or ringing hammer lays the foundation of a competence. - Samuel Smiles

Luck makes friends. - Ovid

Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds. - Ian Fleming

Luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it. - Patrick Dewitt

Luck, by definition, is random and completely unpredictable. Good luck is as common as bad luck. Good luck increases returns and bad luck lowers them. Given enough time, however, the net effect of luck on average returns is small. In contrast, skill has a systematic positive effect. - Larry Harris

Luck, good or bad, is the invisible play of mind upon affairs, the effect of mental aptitudes and habits which are not in sight, but which work and bring forth their due issues. - James Vila Blake

Man - Quotes

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly. - Tennessee Williams

No man can lose what he never had. - George Herbert

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so. - Charles de Gaulle

Physically, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars. - E. H. Chapin

The first duty of a man is to think for himself. - José Martí

The good man is the friend of all living things. - Gandhi

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances. - Aristotle

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous. The sensible man, almost nothing. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones. - Brandon Sanderson

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. - J. D. Salinger

The stronger a man is, the more gentle he can afford to be. - Elbert Hubbard

The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. - Henrik Ibsen

There is no beast more cruel than man. - Leonid Andreyev

We become familiar with the outsides of men, as with the outsides of houses, and think we know them, while we are ignorant of so much that is passing within them. - Christian Nestell Bovee

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. - José Ortega Y Gasset

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also. - Amos Bronson Alcott

Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. - Aesop

You don't fix a man the way you do a fault in a pipe or a leak in a roof. You take him as he is ... or you don't take him at all. - Nora Roberts

Listening - Quotes

The best way to make a long story short is to stop listening. - Evans Esar

The final stage ... of listening is responding. All the effort involved in sensing, interpreting, and evaluating lead to this point, and the process of listening is not complete without it. - Chris Battell

The humble listen to their brothers and sisters because they assume they have something to learn. They are open to correction, and they become wiser through it. - Thomas Hardy

The only thing worse than being on the wrong side of an argument is to be on the right side with no one listening. - Evan Sesar

The receptive attitude enables one mind to fix itself to another as by spiritual grappling-irons. When you see that every word you utter is taken in, and weighed, and measured by your listener, you cannot free yourself from the influence of his presence. You are compelled to have in your thoughts not only the words you utter, but the man to whom they are spoken. You must not only talk, and talk well, but you must talk to him. - Charles Dickens

The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries. - Charles Dickens

The word listening is defined as making an effort to hear something; to pay attention or heed. It is different from hearing, which is the physiological process of the ear absorbing sound waves and transferring them along neural pathways to parts of the brain. Hearing is necessary for listening, but listening is much more than processing sound. Someone may hear very well but be a very poor listener. - Lisa J. Downs

The world has always needed good listeners, for only good listeners are truthful tellers. - Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham

The worst of all listeners is the man who does nothing but listen. - Charles Dickens

There is a difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak. - Lisa Ford

There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing. - G. K. Chesterton

There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too. - Katherine Hannigan

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going. - Sarah Dessen

To be agreeable you must learn to be a good listener. A man who monopolizes a conversation is a bore, no matter how great his knowledge. - Unknown

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say. - Zeno of Citium

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. - Ernest Hemingway

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person. - Harriet Lerner

Wisdom comes with talking less frivolously and listening more seriously. The latter implies a learning attitude; the former assumes an air of omniscience that does not exist. - S. K. Chakraborty

You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to. - Joh Green

Your aim is not to make speakers perceive you as working hard to listen. False listening is worse than no listening at all. - Rebecca Z. Shafir

Truth - Quotes

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. - Francis Bacon

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through. - George Eliot

Truth is a demure lady, much too lady-like to knock you on the head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but the people must want her, and seek her out. - Unknown

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority: it is the highest summit of art and of life. - Henri Frederic Amiel

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth is universal. Perception of truth is not. - Unknown

Truth is within ourselves. - Robert Browning

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense. - Bolingbroke

Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep. - Austin O’Malley

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own. - Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water. - Miguel de Cervantes

Truth never changes. - Rueben Thomas

Truth never damages a cause that is just. - Mahatma Gandhi

Truth never lost ground by enquiry. - William Penn

Truth often spoils the dinner. - Edward Counsel

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers. - William Penn

Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas. - Shaseki

Truth or tact? You have to choose. Most times they are not compatible. - Eddie Cantor

Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market. - Gao XingJian

Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. - Mahatma Gandhi

Humour / Meme

Learning - Quotes

No man is so learned but he may be taught; neither is any one so illiterate but he may teach. - William Scott Downey

No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error. - Alexander Lowen

No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it. - Peter F. Drucker

Of all evil things, the least quantity is to be borne, but of learning and knowledge, the more a man hath, the better he can bear it. - Bion

One destitute of wealth is not destitute, he is indeed rich, but the man devoid of learning is destitute in every way. - Chanakya

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient. - Eugene S. Wilson

People learn more on their own rather than being force fed. - Socrates

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. - Winston Churchill

Play is our brain’s favourite way of learning. - Diane Ackerman

Shall I tell you a secret of a true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point and in that I learn from him. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. - Thomas Huxley

Some will never learn anything because they understand everything too soon. - T. Blount

Teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real - all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does. - Geoff Mulgan

The chief art of learning is to attempt but a little at a time. - John Locke

The greatest enemy of learning is knowing. - John Maxwell

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. - Alvin Toffler

The important point is that learning is not a fixed process, unvarying in all learners. Not only is the human organism characterized by a remarkable plasticity (that is, a striking ability to change), but it is also characterized by a variety of ways of thinking and learning. - Guy Lefrancois

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. - John Lubbock

The learned man has always riches within himself. - Phaedrus

The learned man is only useful to the learned. - Jean Paul R. Richter

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. - Audre Lorde

The learning which is got by one's own observation and experience, is as far beyond that which is got by precept, as the knowledge of a traveller exceeds that which is got by a map. - J. Tillinghast

The light of learning should be the light of truth. It should illumine the darkness of error, and a certain beacon to conduct us through the concealed, the rough, and intricate ways of the world. - Acton

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. - Henry S. Haskins

The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. - Albert Einstein

Knowledge - Quotes

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge. - Marcel Proust

The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. - Sri Aurobindo

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn. - Bertolt Brecht

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand. - Frank Herbert

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge… observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. - Denis Diderot

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. - Bertrand Russell

There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned. - Isaac Asimov

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett

This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power. - Herodotus

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence. - John Quincy Adams

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge. - Socrates

To receive instruction and knowledge is as natural as to receive the light of the sun, if a man opens his eyes. - Benjamin Whichcote

Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind. - Sergey Brin

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. - Anne Rice

We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom. - Michel de Montaigne

We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know. - Albert Einstein

We ought to be ten times as hungry for knowledge as for food for the body. - Henry Ward Beecher

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. - George Bernard Shaw

When the fields of human knowledge are so various and so vast as is the case in our day, the utmost that can be done by single minds not of encyclopedic range, is to master one subject or branch of subject as thoroughly as possible, and to rest content with knowing that others are working in regions where neither time nor strength will permit us to enter. - Henry Parry Liddon

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

Wonder is the desire of knowledge. - Thomas Aquinas

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

You must know all there is to know in your particular field and keep on the alert for new knowledge. The least difference in knowledge between you and another man may spell his success and your failure. - Henry Ford

Kindness - Quotes

How much easier it is to act kindly and naturally to our fellow men, and even to the domestic, useful and faithful animals about us, than to effect a rude and boisterous demeanour, which is sure not only to make others despise us, but on reflection to cause us to despise ourselves. - Nicias Ballard Cooksey

Kindness is an instinctive act, but that impulse must be nurtured, not merely by positive external feedback, but also by internal decision. Make kindness your guiding principle and you will not go wrong. Acknowledge to yourself each time you do something out of kindness and allow yourself to feel good about it so that, as you go forward, more and more of your acts will be acts rooted in kindness. - Ayamantara

Kindness is helpful to the happiness of both recipient and giver. Who does not feel happier on showing kindness to others, and who does not feel happier on receiving the manifestation of kindness? Deeds of kindness shown in the little things of life constitute man's chief happiness. Many are not able to do any great things for others, but all can find abundant opportunity of showing little deeds of kindness which will add much to the happiness of mankind. - Nicias Ballard Cooksey

Kindness is the currency of our hearts, the only currency that can never be subtracted and never be balanced in anyone's ledgers. We choose to be kind because it is the way we want to live our lives, not because we will be rewarded in some way. When we start to keep score, we become closed-hearted: I'm not doing anything nice until someone does something good for me. Our acts of kindness are whole unto themselves. They require no acknowledgment and no reward, for the act itself returns us once again to the heart of our own humanity. - Will Glennon

Kindness is the visible expression of a feeling and merciful heart; it is the going forth of a tender and susceptible mind; it claims kindred with the human race; it is all ear to listen – all heart to feel – all eye to examine and to weep – all hand and foot to relieve; it invites the sufferer with kind words, and sends him not empty away. - John Angell James

Kindness is too often left uncultivated, because men do not sufficiently understand its value. Men may be charitable and not kind; merciful, yet not kind; self-denying and yet not kind. If they would add a little common kindness to their uncommon graces, they would convert ten where they now only abate the prejudice of one. - Frederick W. Faber

Imagination - Quotes

The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. - Albert Einstein

The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialistic practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open. - John Berger

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. - Oscar Wilde

The imagination is man’s power over nature. - Wallace Stevens

The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow. - Leonardo da Vinci

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea. - Max Planck

The power of imagination makes us infinite. - John Muir

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. - Voltaire

What feeling, knowledge or will man has depends in the last resort upon what imagination he has. - Søren Kierkegaard

The most important thing for a child to learn is that only some things can be imagined into reality. The most important thing for an adult to learn is that even if it doesn’t happen all the time, things DO get imagined into reality. - John Green

The only faculty by which we can bring the invisible near, is the imagination. Beyond that which the eye sees, beyond that which the ear hears, is a great region in which life is freer and more transcendently glorious than this. The imagination in us finds its field in trying to grasp that great fact. - Reuben Thomas

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sorcery and charm of imagination, and the power it gives to the individual to transform his world into a new world of order and delight, makes it one of the most treasured of all human capacities. - Frank Barron

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. - Henry Ward Beecher

The source of genius is imagination alone. - Eugene Delacroix

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. - Alfred North Whitehead

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangibles, ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. - Chuck Palahniuk

The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire. - John L. Mason

The world is but a canvas to the imagination. - Henry David Thoreau

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. - Albert Einstein

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. - Thomas Alva Edison

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire. - George Eliot

We imagine what we desire; we will what we imagine; and at last we create what we will. - George Bernard Shaw

Whatever one man is capable of imagining, other men will prove themselves capable of realizing. - Jules Verne

Without imagination, a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it. - Christian Nestell Bovee

You can’t do it unless you imagine it. - George Lucas

You have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person. - Margaret Drabble

Your knowledge has limits but your imagination does not. - Geraint Straker

Ideas - Quotes

If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. - Howard Zinn

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait. - Robert Heinlein

If you believe in an idea, you don’t own you, it owns you. - Raymond Chandler

If you're going to deal in the world of ideas, you have to be, to some extent, a salesman. And you're going to sink or rise according to your ability to be a good salesman of ideas. - Barry Diller

In the same way as the tree bears the same fruit year after year, but each time new fruit, all lastingly valuable ideas in thinking must always be reborn. - Albert Schweitzer

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. - Edward de Bono

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on. - Ursula K. le Guin

It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual. - Alexander Fleming

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. - Thomas Mann

It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date. - Roger von Oech

It’s not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it’s painful waiting for them. - Oscar Wilde

I've known people who had fantastic ideas, but who couldn't get the idea off the ground because they approached everything weakly. They thought that their ideas would somehow take off by themselves, or that just coming up with an idea was enough. Let me tell you something – it's not enough. It will never be enough. You have to put the idea into action. If you don't have the motivation and the enthusiasm, your great idea will simply sit on top of your desk or inside your head and go nowhere. - Donald Trump

Make it a point to keep a lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are currently working on. - Thomas Alva Edison

Man’s fear of ideas is probably the greatest dike holding back human knowledge and happiness. - Morris Leopold Ernst

My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty. - Bruce Lee

Life - Quotes

A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world. - J. D. Stroube

Always choose to heal, not to hurt, to forgive not to despise, to persevere not to quit, to smile not to frown, and to love not to hate. At the end of life, what really matters is not what we bought, but what we built, not what we got, but what we shared, not our competence but our character, and not our success but our significance. - Unknown

Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail. - Henry David Thoreau

The days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning. - Thomas Jefferson

Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighbourhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living. - Truman Capote

More on Life Here, and the book The Mystery of Life - a collection of quotes on and pertaining to life.

Humour

Anger - Quotes

It’s important for people to keep in mind that while anger is a feeling that everybody has, aggression is a choice. - Carole D. Stovall

It’s so important to realize that every time you get upset, it drains your emotional energy. Losing your cool makes you tired. Getting angry a lot messes with your health. - Joyce Meyer

Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. - Mitch Albom

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. - James Thurber

Never forget what a man has said to you when he was angry. If he has charged you with anything, you had better look it up. Anger is a bow that will shoot sometimes where another feeling will not. - Henry Ward Beecher

Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people. - Mario Puzo

Never respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it. Don’t allow his anger to become your anger. - Bohdi Sanders

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched. - George Jean Nathan

Not to be provok'd is best: But if mov'd, never correct till the fume is spent; for every stroke our fury strikes, is sure to hit ourselves at last. - William Penn

Postpone today's anger until tomorrow. - Tagalog Proverb

Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done. - Lee Ang

The anger of the prudent never shows. - Burmese Proverb

The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered. - George Eliot

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot. - Plato

When anger walks it is strongest; let it rest and it gets weak. - Edward Counsel

When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing. - Octavia E. Butler

Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at yourself. When you are angry, you are not very beautiful. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath. - Eckhart Tolle

Whining is anger through a small opening. - Stuart Smalley

You can learn to handle your anger well. First, recognize that anger is a normal part of life. Everybody feels angry from time to time. Like all feelings, anger is neither good nor bad, it just is. - Ronald & Patricia Potter-Efron

Loss - Quotes

That loss is most discreditable which is caused by negligence. - Seneca

That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. - Richard Bach

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. - Elizabeth Bishop

The fear of losing is the flip side of the need to win. Because evolution doesn't favour losers, the fear of losing is so programmed into our DNA that we do all sorts of things, both rational and irrational, to avoid losing. We don't let people cut into line, we compete in meaningless games and sports as if our lives were at stake, and we will never buy from or agree with someone who makes us feel as if he's about to win and we're about to lose. - Gene Bedell

The loss which is unknown is no loss at all. - Publilius Syrus

The victor shall soon be the vanquished, if he relax his exertion; and ... the vanquished this year, may be the victor in the next, in spite of all competition. - Abraham Lincoln

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking. - James Patterson

There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other. - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

'Tis better to have loved and loss than never to have loved at all. - Alfred Tennyson

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. - Cassandra Clare

We gain and lose by the same means. - Roman Proverb

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety – and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. - Judith Viorst

We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one. - Dean Koontz

We never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. - Gail Cladwell

What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. - Suzanne Collins

What makes defeat so painful is just the awareness that the other has won. It hurts to lose because it feels so good to win. - David Roochnik

Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here's what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it's still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it's been too long since you missed them last. - Kristin O’Donnell

Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it. - Dianne Feinstein

Wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss, but cheerily seek how to redress their harms. - William Shakespeare

You can't blame your opponents for applying a strategy that beats your brains out with regularity. - Bill Clinton

You know what makes a good loser? Practice. - Ernest Hemingway

You’re never a loser until you quit trying. - Mike Ditka

Lawyers - Quotes

Law is an imperfect profession in which success can rarely be achieved without some sacrifice of principle. Thus, all practicing lawyers – and most others in the profession – will necessarily be imperfect, especially in the eyes of young idealists. There is no perfect justice, just as there is no absolute in ethics. But there is perfect injustice, and we know it when we see it. - Alan Dershowitz

Lawyer even sounds like liar. - Walter Mosley

Lawyers are a bad lot.... They cheat their living out of honest people. - Albert R. Carman

Lawyers are doubters, skeptics; not in a bad sense. But they never know anything absolutely and utterly without qualifications or modifications. - G. N. Tillman

Lawyers are ideological enemies of informal justice. - Richard L Abel

Lawyers are like catfish. A nibble here, a nibble there ... before you know it the principal's gone, you've got a pile of bills, and not much else. - Meredith Blevins

Lawyers are like cheeses. There are lots of good ones, but not everybody likes the taste of some or can afford the best of others. - Robin Ellison

Lawyers are like doctors. They've each a secret language of their own so that if you get a letter from one lawyer you've got to take it to another to get it read, just like a doctor sends you to a chemist with a rigmarole that no one else can read, so they can charge you what they like for a drop of coloured water. - Harold Brighhouse

Children - Quotes

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child’s tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It’s not funny and it’s not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn’t the least bit funny. - Ben Stein

Small children give you a headache, big children a heartache. - Russian Proverb

That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life. - Henry Ward Beecher

The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day. - M. Grundler

The children despise their parents until the age of when they suddenly become just like them – thus preserving the system. - Quentin

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. - Socrates

The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents. - Christopher Paolini

The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refuelling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be. - Marianne E. Neifert

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. - Philip Wylie

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith. - Billy Graham

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. - John Lubbock

The more we shelter children from every disappointment, the more devastating future disappointments will be. - Fred G. Gosman

The older I get, the more I marvel at the wisdom of children. - David Morgan

The soul is healed by being with children. - Fyodor Dostoevsky