Abraham Lincoln: Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? Albert Camus: Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves. Alice Walker: No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. Anais Nin: Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. Ann Richards: I’ve always said that in politics, your enemies can’t hurt you, but your friends will kill you. Anna Garlin Spencer: The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success. Anne Morrow Lindbergh: If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Aristotle: What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. Audre Lorde: The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. Ben Jonson: True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value. Bertrand Russell: A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation. Blaise Pascal: Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back. C. S. Lewis: Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.” Charlie Daniels: A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You’re free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Cicero: It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity. Confucius: Silence is the true friend that never betrays. Cornelia Otis Skinner: To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time. The Ape in Me, 1959 David Hume: Truth springs from argument amongst friends. Deng Ming-Dao: Those truly linked don’t need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, Their friendship is as true as ever. Don Marquis: There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living. E. B. White: You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, “Charlotte’s Web” E. M. Forster: One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life. Ecclesiasticus: A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure.(6:14) Edgar Watson Howe: When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief: enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best. Eleanor Roosevelt: Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world. Elie Wiesel: Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. Elizabeth Foley: The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand. Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you — Nobody — too?Then there’s a pair of us?Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know! Emily Dickinson: Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen —
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs — between – This entry continued … Epicurus: It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
3rd century BCE Francis Bacon: There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals. Francis Bacon: We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends. Francis David: We need not think alike to love alike. Francois de La Rochefoucauld: A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring. Friedrich Nietzsche: It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. George Eliot: Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking. George Eliot: What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? George Santayana: The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.The Life of Reason, 1905-1906 George Santayana: Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945 George Washington: Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation. Gore Vidal: Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. Henri Nouwen: When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. Henry David Thoreau: True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance. Henry David Thoreau: The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this? Henry Ward Beecher: It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. Indira Gandhi: You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist. It’s a Wonderful Life: Remember, no man is a failure who has friends. Jane Austen: Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love. Jane Austen: Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does. Jessamyn West: Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. Katherine Mansfield: I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. Louisa May Alcott: “Stay” is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary. Marcel Proust: Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Margaret Guenther: [W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us. Mark Twain: The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. Mark Twain: Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain: The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. Marlene Dietrich: It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. Martin Luther King, Jr.: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends Martin Luther King, Jr.: Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend. May Sarton: Though friendship is not quick to burn,It is explosive stuff. Maya Angelou: Alone, all aloneNobody, but nobodyCan make it out here alone. Mohandas K. Gandhi: It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. Norman Douglas: To find a friend one must close one eye; To keep him, two. Oscar Levant: I have no trouble with my enemies. But my goddam friends,…they are the ones that keep me walking the floor nights. Rabindranath Tagore: Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance. Rachel Carson: If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Rachel Naomi Remen: The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words. Ralph Waldo Emerson: I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The only way to have a friend is to be one. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. Ralph Waldo Emerson: It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. Ralph Waldo Emerson: He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship. (adapted) Ralph Waldo Emerson: A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson: A friend is one before whom I may think aloud. Robert Frost: When a friend calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don’t stand still and look around On all the hills I haven’t hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall, And plod: I go up to the stone wall For a friendly visit. Robert Louis Stevenson: We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. Robert McAfee Brown: How does one keep from “growing old inside”? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable. Rollo May: There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever. Samuel Coleridge: Friendship is a sheltering tree. Samuel Johnson: There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity. Samuel Johnson: Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Friendship is a sheltering tree. Sarah Orne Jewett: Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of. Seneca: Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment. Shel Silverstein: Friendship
I’ve discovered a way to stay friends forever —
There’s really nothing to it.
I simply tell you what to do
And you do it! Shusha Guppy: The verb “to love” in Persian is “to have a friend.” “I love you” translated literally is “I have you as a friend,” and “I don’t like you” simply means “I don’t have you as a friend.” Simone Weil: The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?” Simone Weil: Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Song of Solomon: This is my beloved and this is my friend. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama: We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection. Thomas Jefferson: But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. Toni Morrison: I’m a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me. speech, SarahLawrenceCollege, Bronxville, New York, 1978 Unknown: Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. Unknown: Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes. W. Somerset Maugham: It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it. Warren G. Harding: Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything. William Blake: The bird a nest the spider a web the human friendship. William Blake: It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. Zora Neale Hurston: It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.
Abraham Lincoln: The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time. Albert Einstein: I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. Alex Haley: In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future. Anais Nin: We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. C. S. Lewis: The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. Charlie Daniels: A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You’re free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past! Dorothy Thompson: Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow. Edward Everett Hale: To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in, and
To lend a hand. Edward Gibbon: I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past. Elaine Maxwell: My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man’s doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny. Eric Hoffer: In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. George Washington Carver: How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all of these. George Will: The future has a way of arriving unannounced. Gloria Dean Randle Scott: The critical responsibility for the generation you’re in is to help provide the shoulders, the direction, and the support for those generations who come behind. Hannah Arendt: Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. Jean Rostand: When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won’t one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic. John Dewey: Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. John F. Kennedy: The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. John F. Kennedy: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. John L. Lewis: Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America. Marcus Aurelius: Every man’s life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain. Niels Bohr: Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. Patricia Hampl: The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times. Pearl S. Buck: One faces the future with one’s past. Pema Chodron: Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame — or one that is conducive to loving-kindness. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope. Simone Weil: The future is made of the same stuff as the present. Thich Nhat Hanh: Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life. Thomas Berry: If the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants. Thomas Jefferson: I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past. Vernon Cooper: These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future. W. E. B. Du Bois: Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.
It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.
It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.
Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.
Albert Einstein: It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it. Anne Frank: No one has ever become poor by giving. Barbara Bush: Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others. Charles Dickens: Charity begins at home and justice begins next door. Dale Evans: Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas. Edward Everett Hale: To look forward and not back,
To look out and not in, and
To lend a hand. Elbert Hubbard: The love we give away is the only love we keep. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in it. Francois de La Rochefoucauld: Many people despise wealth, but few know how to give it away. George H. W. Bush: I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. John D. Rockefeller: Think of giving not as a duty but as a privilege. Maimonides: Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity’s golden ladder. Maya Angelou: I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver. Pamela Glenconner: Giving presents is a talent; to know what a person wants, to know when and how to get it, to give it lovingly and well. Unless a character possesses this talent there is no moment more annihilating to ease than that in which a present is received and given. Peyton Conway March: There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else. Ralph Waldo Emerson: We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. Ralph Waldo Emerson: We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. Susan Sarandon: So I would hope they would develop some kind of habit that involves understanding that their life is so full they can afford to give in all kinds of ways to other people. I consider that to be baseline spirituality. Thornton Wilder: Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.from “The Matchmaker” Winston Churchill: We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. Goals Anatole France: To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. Anne Frank: We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. Carl Sandburg: Nothing happens unless first we dream. Carl Schurz: Our ideals resemble the stars, which illuminate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal. David Ogilvy: Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals. Ella Fitzgerald: It isn’t where you come from, it’s where you’re going that counts. Ella Wheeler Wilcox: One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go. This entry continued … Epictetus: First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Frank Lloyd Wright: I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. Hannah More: Obstacles are those things you see when you take your eyes off the goal. Helen Keller: I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker. Henry David Thoreau: Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be. Herb Cohen: If you don’t know where you are going, you can never get lost. Herodotus: Some give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before. J. C. Penney: Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I’ll give you a stock clerk. John Dewey: Arriving at one point is the starting point to another. John Dewey: Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another. John Dewey: Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live. John F. Kennedy: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. John F. Kennedy: The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. John Gardner: Most important, leaders can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts. John Naisbitt: Strategic planning is worthless — unless there is first a strategic vision. Mabel Newcomber: It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. Maxine Hong Kingston: To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world — that I am able to change it in positive ways. Michael Hanson: To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action. Michelangelo: The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. Rene Descartes: Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. Richard J. Foster: Goals are discovered, not made.Celebration of Discipline Robert H. Schuller: Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive. Robert J. McKain: The reason most goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first. Seneca: If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable. Ursula K. Le Guin: It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end. Victor Frankl: What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. Vince Lombardi: Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. Vince Lombardi: Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you’re willing to pay the price. W. Clement Stone: When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it. Yogi Berra: You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there. Habit A. E. Housman: A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind,
Is what you very seldom find. If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt would occupy you long
The force of habit is so strong. Annie Dillard: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Aristotle: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle: Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. Charles Kettering: If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine. Mark Twain: To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times. Spanish proverb: Habits are first cobwebs, then cables. Thomas Jefferson: He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual. William James: But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims. Health Albert Schweitzer: Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory. Angela Lansbury: To me, good health is more than just exercise and diet. It’s really a point of view and a mental attitude you have about yourself. Benjamin Jowett: We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. Izaak Walton: Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of; a blessing that money cannot buy. Judy Collins: If I had not been already been meditating, I would certainly have had to start. I’ve treated my own depression for many years with exercise and meditation, and I’ve found that to be a tremendous help. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy: Sendentary people are apt to have sluggish minds. A sluggish mind is apt to be reflected in flabbiness of body and in a dullness of expression that invites no interest and gets none. Walter Cronkite: America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
A. W. Tozer: Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity. Anne Frank: In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. Barbara De Angelis: The real act of marriage takes place in the heart, not in the ballroom or church or synagogue. It’s a choice you make – not just on your wedding day, but over and over again — and that choice is reflected in the way you treat your husband or wife. Blaise Pascal: The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of. Blaise Pascal: We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. Blaise Pascal: We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart. Carl Jung: Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. Charles Dickens: I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. Charles H. Perkhurst: The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of. Charlotte Bronte: Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. (Suicide Note, August 17, 1935) Confucius: To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right. David Korten: If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart. Edmund Burke: 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. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: A good heart is better than all the heads in the world. Elizabeth Stone: Making the decision to have a child – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body. Emily Dickinson: If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain. Friedrich von Schiller: If you want to study yourself — look into the hearts of other people. If you want to study other people — look into your own heart. Golda Meir: At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent. Helen Keller: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched … but are felt in the heart. Henri-Frederic Amiel: Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The holiest of holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart. James Baldwin: Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. James Earl Jones: One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. Kahlil Gibran: Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. Lord Byron: There is no instinct like that of the heart. Marianne Williamson: In every community there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart there is the power to do it. Marietta McCarty: Joy is a heart full and a mind purified by gratitude. Mohandas K. Gandhi: If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove blemishes from others without thinking evil of them. Neil Gaiman: Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… This entry continued … Pearl S. Buck: The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. Pearl S. Buck: Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame. Pema Chodron: When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. Poem of a Buddhist nun: Only within burns the fire I kindle.
My heart the altar.
My heart the altar. Princess Diana: Only do what your heart tells you. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. Sara Paddison: You may not always be able to feel a deeper heart feeling right away, but stay focused in the heart. The sincerity of your effort can reconnect you to your heart current and start the juices flowing. To plug in, think of someone you love or remember what feels good, maybe a fulfilling experience. Feelings help you remember. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama: This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. Thich Nhat Hanh: May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh: The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart. Thornton Wilder: We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. Vaclav Havel: The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility. Virginia Woolf: The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Wallace Stegner: Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. WashingtonIrving: Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart. William Wordsworth: Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart… Winston Churchill: Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains. Zelda Fitzgerald: Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.
Albert Camus: Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves. Alfred Adler: A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt to be dangerous. Arthur Dobrin: There is always a way to be honest without being brutal. Clarence Darrow: With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men. Eleanor Roosevelt: People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built. Freeman Thomas: Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition. G. William Domhoff: There is more to American politics than fat cats and their political friends. There are serious-minded liberals who fight the good fight on many issues, ecologically oriented politicians who remain true to their cause, and honest people of every political stripe who are not beholden to any wealthy people. But there are not enough of them, and they are often worn down by the constant pressure from lobbyists, lawyers and conventional politicians. John Gardner: The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can. Maimonides: Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity’s golden ladder. Marie de Beausacq: Of all the feats of skill, the most difficult is that of being honest. Robert Louis Stevenson: We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. Thomas Jefferson: Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, — entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; — freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, — these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
Abigail Adams: If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. Albert Einstein: I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. Albert Schweitzer: The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education. Alex Carey: … the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.Australian social scientist, quoted by Noam Chomsky in World Orders Old and New Audre Lorde: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change. Aung San Suu Kyi: Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. Cesar Chavez: The first principal of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating. David Kaczynski: We’ve got to take back the ideal of justice, we’ve got to take back this principle of human dignity. We’ve got to take it back from vengeance, from hatred, we’ve got to say: look, we’re all in this together. We are human beings. Dom Helder Camara: When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. Eleanor Holmes Norton: The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with. Elie Wiesel: This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century — solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others. Eugene V. Debs: Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ”Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society. Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.1908 speech Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Privilege is the greatest enemy of right. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream — a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality. Noam Chomsky: States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions. Noam Chomsky: The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. Paulo Freire: Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. Pearl S. Buck: You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory. Robert F. Kennedy: Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired. Saul Alinsky: Last guys don’t finish nice. Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago (Philippines): I shall be honored to go to jail. Under a dictatorship, the detention cell is a place of honor. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama: Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. This entry continued … Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama: A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities. Thomas Jefferson: The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. Vaclav Havel: Genuine politics — even politics worthy of the name — the only politics I am willing to devote myself to — is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.
