Achievement

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try"

• Beverly Sills

Advice

"It is the duty, and ought to be the pleasure , of age and experience to warn and instruct youth and to come to the aid of experience. When sailors have discovered rocks or breakers, and have had the good luck to escape with life from admidst them, they, unless they be pirates or barbarians as well as sailors, point out the spots for the placing of buoys and of lights, in order that others may not be exposed to the danger which they have so narrowly escaped. What man of common humanity, having, by good luck, missed being engulfed in a quagmire or quicksand, will withhold from his neighbors a knowledge of the peril without which the dangerous spots are not to be approached?"

• William Cobbett, "Advice To Young Men And (incidentally) To Young Women In The Middle and Higher Ranks Of Life." 1829

Aim

"Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself"

• Joel Hawes

Anger

"If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself: "I used to be angry every day; then every other day; now only every third or fourth day." When you reach thirty days offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods"

• Epictetus

"Never do anything when you are in a temper, for you will do everything wrong."

• Baltasar Gracian

"Anger is what arouses you to challenge a situation. Aim to use it to improve things. Often, with it, you can change things."

• Walter McQuade and Anna Aikman

"Don't be afraid to express anger (hiding it is even more stressful than letting it out), but choose your fights; don't hassle over every little thing... You can also give in once in a while, instead of always insisting you are right and others are wrong."

• Jane E. Brody

Arument

"I beg you, do not be unchangeable.

Do not believe that you alone can be right.

The man who thinks that,

The man who maintains that only he has the power

To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul-

A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty."

• Sophocles

"AUDI PARTEM ALTERUM. (Hear the other side.)"

Saint Augustine

"Hear the other side(s)"

• me

Assertiveness

"You will not be discouraged if the world does not rush to you, demanding what you have... Neither will you quietly sit down to let the world wonder and then seek you; but you will be aggressive; you will carry your truths to people and cause them to see them so clearly that they must accept them."

• Edith Kincaid Butler

"I would like to amend the idea of being in the right place at the right time. There are many people who were in the right place at the right time but didn't know it. You have to recognize when the right place and the right time fuse and take advantage of that opportunity. There are plenty of opportunities out there. You can't sit back and wait."

• Ellen Metcalf

"If you aspire to anything better than politics, expect no cooperation from men. They will not further anything good. You must prevail of your own force, as a plant springs and grows by its own vitality."

• Henry David Thoreau

"When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make a lemonade."

• Dale Carnegie

Bad Advice

"Be on thy guard against the good and just! They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue-they hate the lonesome ones."

• Friedrich Nietzche

"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared."

"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."

• Franz Kafka

Beauty

"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. "Think in simples" as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles."

• Frank Lloyd Wright

"Beauty is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield."

• Honore' de Balzac

Beginnings

"Before you begin a thing, remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. If you could see them clearly, naturally you could do a great deal to get rid of them but you can't. 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

Betterment

"Slumber not in tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. Advance with it."

• Giuseppe Mazzini

"It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life."

• Christina, Queen of Sweden, 1629-89

"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden."

• Goethe

Books

"Learn to love good books. There are treasures in books that all the money of the world cannot buy, that the poorest laborer can have for nothing."

• Robert G. Ingersoll

"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."

• Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

"Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as by the latter."

• Paxton Hood

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think."

• James McCosh

Boredom/Excitement

"When a thing bores you, do not do it. Do not pursue a fruitless perfection."

• Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix

Building/Architecture

"When we build, let us think we build for ever."

• John Ruskin

Business

"Don't open a shop unless you know how to smile."

• Jewish proverb

Calmness/Coolness

"Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy; calmness is a great advantage."

• George Herbert

"Keep cool; anger is not an argument"

• Daniel Webster

Career

"Whatever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupation which he should like to do anyhow, even if he did not need the money."

• William Lyon Phelps

Change

"Keep constantly in mind how many things you yourself have witnessed changes already. The universe is change, life is understanding."

• Marcus Aurelius

Contention

"Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you."

• Friedrich Nietzsche

Friendship

"Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins."

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

Influence

"You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence."

• C. G. Jung

Love

"Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light."

• Thomas Carlyle, "Goethe," Foreign Review, No. 111, 1828

Maher, Bill

"New Yorkers take pride in living in the city that never sleeps - unfortunately, it's also the city that never showers, brushes its teeth, or has good aim when it pees." - 05/20/94

"I myself always live every day as if it were my last. Which is why I sleep on a bedpan with a tube up my nose." - 11/19/93

"How come, if a woman comes to work in a tailored men's suit, that's considered stylish - but if I show up here in a simple floor-length gown, I'm weird?" - 05/06/94

"Fames has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddie pool." - 03/14/94

"I'll tell you how I feel about porn channels. They don't educate us, the don't enlighten us, and they don't come in clearly enough where I live." - 09/12/93

Misc.

"Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation."

• Norman Mailer, "Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out" (1959)

"[Three classes]: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see."

• Leonardo da Vinci, quoted by Madariaga, Saturday Review, April 22, 1967

"Whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race."

• Allen Ginsberg, contribution, The New Yorker, August 24, 1968

"No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or "get rich" in business by being a conformist."

• J(ean) Paul Getty, interview, Paris Herald Tribune, January 10, 1961

"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty."

• Henry Ford, attributed

"Equality

I spoke the word

As if a wedding vow

Ah, but I was so much older then

I'm Younger than that now."

• Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages" (1964)

"And man has actually invented God... the marvel is that such an idea of the necessit of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man."

• Fyodor Dostoyevski, Bk. V, ch. 3

"Love in young men: for the most part is not love but sexual desire, and its accomplishment is the end."

• Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, spanish novelist, playwright, poet
  "Your present plans are going to succeed" - fortune cookie
  "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature." - Joseph Campbell
  "Friendship is like peeing your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel its true warmth."
  "It makes about as much sense to have a smoking section in the restaurant, as it does to have a peeing section in a pool." - Dr. Wayne Dyer

"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity, and incumbency"

• George W. Bush, June 14, 2001,

speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaware that a live television camera was still rolling
"We as attackers have the initiative. Viciously, ruthlessly, attack, attack, attack, and when in doubt, attack again." ~Ronald Reagan, US President 1981-1989

Religion

"Religion is all bunk."

• Thomas Alva Edison, conversation with Burroughs, Firestone, and Edward Marshall, on annual vacation

"...religion is needed for restraining rude populations, which have to be ruled, whereas rational demonstration is for such, of a contemplative nature, as know how to rule themselves and others"

• Guido (Giordano) Bruno, Italian philosopher, Heroic Furies

"If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."

• Mikhail A. Bakunin, quoted by Benjamin R. Tucker, Address, Unitarian Ministers Association, October 14, 1890

"Religion is a collective insanity"

• Mikhail A. Bakunin, quoted in Noyes, Views of Religion

"Tanttum religio potuit suadere malorum."

(To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.)

• Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

"In the dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides."

• Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Einfalle

"All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicasies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; and outrage on our dignity"

• Joseph Conrad, author's notes to The Shadow-Line

"The Simple fact is that the New Testament, as we know it, is a helter-skelter accumulation of more or less discordant documents, some of them probably of respectable origin but others palpably apocryphal, and that most of them, the good along with the bad, show unmistakable signs of having been tampered with."

• H. L. Menchen "Treatise on the Gods"

"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the opressed creature, the heart of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower."

• Karl Marx "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

"(Religion) With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" - Steven Weinberg
"The More I Study Religions The More I Am Convinced That Man Never Worshiped Anything But Himself.” - Richard Burton

“Speaking as a citizen of another country, you cannot get elected to Prime Minister here if you say things like “God told me to run, or “The jury is still out on Evolution.” - Kim Campbell, Fmr. Prime Minister of Canada.

Reputation

"You can't build your reputation on what you're going to do." - Henry Ford

Seinfeld, Jerry

"If it wasn't for masturbation, most men wouldn't know that anything could happen" - 09/12/93

Self Importance, Self Righteousness, Hypocrisy, and Morality

"Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance...If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to...catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe." -- Carlos Castaneda

"Self-righteous morality is jealousy with a halo." -- HG Wells

"Self righteousness is a mask for hypocrisy and self importance." -- Carlos Castaneda

Truth

"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."

• Guido (Giordano) Bruno, Italian philosopher, quoted in Mason, Great and Mind Liberating Thought

War

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace....They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches." - Eugene V. Debs