If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to set off that spark in one another.
– Kenny Ausubell

Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
– Louisa May Alcott

I wonder at a man who takes great pains to decorate and to make comfortable this mortal habits and totally forgets his permanent abode. Hold yourselves accountable before you are held accountable. Do not approach the goat from the front, the horse from the back, and the fool from any side. Patience to faith is like the head to the body. The person who has no patience has no faith. It is better for one to be wrong after consultation than to be right without having it. Do not look at how small your sin is. Consider the greatness of whom you sinned against. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
- Douglas Adams

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
- Abraham Lincoln

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
- Christopher Morley

A man's respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
- Voltaire

Dance like it hurts,/ Love like you need money,/ Work when people are watching.
- Scott Adams

“The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.”- Erich Fromm Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
- Redd Foxx

The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
- Horace Walpole

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
- Don Marquis

By the time we've made it, we've had it.
- Malcolm Forbes

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.
- Cullen Hightower

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.
- Samuel Johnson

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
- William Blake

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
- Thomas Szasz

Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface. But sometimes, there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie.
- Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
- Bertrand Russell

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
- Josh Billings

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
- Voltaire

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
- Bill Watterson

"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion."
Sir Arthur C. Clarke

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
- Simon Cameron

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
- Bertrand Russell

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
- George Bernard Shaw

"The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
William James The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay

I had a life once...Now I have a computer and a modem ~ There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
- Alfred Korzybski

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
- Edwin Schlossberg

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
- Albert Camus

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
- Evelyn Waugh

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.
- Norm Papernick

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one."
- George Bernard Shaw

Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
- Charles Caleb Colton

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
- Saki

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
- Alfred North Whitehead

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- Peter Drucker

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?
- Al Boliska

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.
- Margaret Millar

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.
- Beryl Pfizer

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
- Clarence Darrow

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
- Blaise Pascal

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice.
- George Jackson

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, always.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
- Aldous Huxley

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
- Quentin Crisp

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
- Thomas Jefferson

All things are difficult before they are easy.
- Dr. Thomas Fuller

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
- George Bernard Shaw

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson

I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.
- Fran Lebowitz

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
- Thomas Jefferson

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.
- Edmund Wilson

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
- Wendell Johnson

I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.
- Steve Martin

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
- James Bovard

The Brave do not live long, but the Timid do not live at all

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
- Winston Churchill

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
- Abraham Lincoln

A Bell is a Cup Until it is Struck

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

The reverse side also has a reverse side.
- Japanese Proverb

People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
- Bob Hope

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
- Thomas H. Huxley

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
- Henry Fielding

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
- David Brinkley

It never hurts to ask. Unless you ask for hurt.
- Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
- Edward Gibbon

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
- Stanislaw Lem

I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.
- Sally Kempton

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
- Bertrand Russell

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
- Richard Feynman

Television is for appearing on - not for looking at.
- Noel Coward

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
- John Andrew Holmes

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
- Bill Cosby

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
- Gandhi

"The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others."
- Van Gogh

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
- Voltaire

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

There comes a point in your life when you realize: Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won't anymore...
And who always will.
So, don't worry about people from your past, there's a reason why they didn't make it to your future..  


"If one can do it, you too can do it, If none can do it, you must do it."
Japanese proverb