The human race is all the same when it comes to romantic relations,' said the Major. 'A startling absence of impulse control combined with complete myopia.
All kinds are good except the kind that bores you.
Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)
Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy; the mad daughter of a wise mother.
Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.
The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.
They use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to disguise their thoughts.
It is only through timidity that states are lost.
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.
Truth is a fruit which should not be plucked until it is ripe.
Work keeps at bay, three great evils -- boredom, vice and need.
Work banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.
You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.
The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.
Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.
Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.
From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
Tom Robbins
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
If we study the lives of great men and women carefully and unemotionally we find that, invariably, greatness was developed, tested and revealed through the darker periods of their lives. One of the largest tributaries of the RIVER OF GREATNESS is always the STREAM OF ADVERSITY.
Cavett Robert
A superficial knowledge is not enough. It must be a knowledge capable of analyzing a situation quickly and making an immediate decision.
Any man who selects a goal in life which can be fully achieved has already defined his own limitations.
When it's foggy in the pulpit it's cloudy in the pew.
To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, What's it for?
Robert Fulghum
When you affirm your own rightness in the universe, then you co-operate with others easily and automatically as part of your own nature. You, being yourself, helps others be themselves. Because you recognize your own uniqueness you will not need to dominate others, nor cringe before them
Jane Roberts
Men... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.
Frederick William Robertson
Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet--a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.
No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.
Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything that is worth doing.
It is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.
I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
John D. Rockefeller
I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build.
The person who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. If you do each day's task successfully, and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about, and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.
If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.
It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
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