Do not think that what your thoughts dwell upon is of no matter. Your thoughts are making you.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

And if small businesspeople say they made it on their own, all they are saying is that nobody else worked seven days a week in their place. Nobody showed up in their place to open the door at five in the morning. Nobody did their thinking, and worrying, and sweating for them.

Paul Ryan

Life is half spent before one knows what it is.

Proverb

Oh, if I had Orpheus' voice and poetry with which to move the Dark Maid and her Lord, I'd call you back, dear love, from the world below. I'd go down there for you. Charon or the grim King's dog could not prevent me then from carrying you up into the fields of light.

Euripides

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

Erma Bombeck

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

Isabel Allende

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine

Plato

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

Benjamin Franklin

Much learning shows how little mortals know; much wealth, how little wordings enjoy.

Edward Young

Common sense is that layer of prejudices which we acquire before we are sixteen.

Albert Einstein

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Henry David Thoreau