Quotes On Love And Happiness biography
source link (google.com.pk)We would rather see those to whom we do good, than those who do good to us.”
- La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections
April 10th, 2014
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere…. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
- G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg”
April 9th, 2014
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell
April 8th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
- Oscar Wilde
April 7th, 2014
“We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.”
- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
April 4th, 2014
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
April 3rd, 2014
“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
- Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
April 2nd 2014
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
- Thomas Merton
April 1st, 2014
“If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.”
- La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections
March 31st, 2014
“You increase your self-respect when you feel you’ve done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.”
- Eugene Delacroix
March 28th, 2014
“The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading, and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
March 27th, 2014
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness
March 26th, 2014
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere….But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
- G.K. Chesterton, The Advantages of Having One Leg
March 25th, 2014
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
- Simone Weil, Waiting For God
March 24th, 2014
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
March 21st, 2014
“Idleness is often covered by turbulence and hurry. He that neglects his known duty and real employment naturally endeavours to crowd his mind with something that may bar out the remembrance of his own folly, and does any thing but what he ought to do with eager diligence, that he may keep himself in his own favour.”
- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
March 20th, 2014
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”
- M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
March 19th, 2014
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
March 18th, 2014
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
- St. Therese of Lisieux
March 17th, 2014
“The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.”
- La Rochefoucauld
March 14th, 2014
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
- Iris Murdoch
March 13th, 2014
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
- G.K. Chesterton
March 12th, 2014
“If better were within, better would come out.”
- Simon Patrick
March 11th, 2014
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
- Joseph Addison
March 10th, 2014
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
March 7th, 2014
“She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
March 6th, 2014
“Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”
- Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness
March 5th, 2014
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
- G.K. Chesterton, “On Pleasure-Seeking”
March 4th, 2014
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
- Giacometti, in Giacometti: A Biography by James Lord
March 3rd, 2014
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
- Leo Tolstoy
February 28th, 2014
“You can never predict what little things in the way somebody looks or talks or acts will set off peculiar emotional reactions in other people.”
- Andy Warhol
February 27th, 2014
“The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.”
- Henry David Thoreau
February 26th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
- Oscar Wilde
February 25th, 2014
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
- C.S. Lewis
February 24th, 2014
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
- Samuel Johnson
February 21st, 2014
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
February 20th, 2014
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
- Leo Tolstoy
February 19th, 2014
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
February 18th, 2014
“Optimism is true moral courage.”
- Ernest Shackleton
February 17th, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
- Willa Cather
February 14th, 2014
“Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, Upon Some Verses of Virgil
February 13th, 2014
“No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.”
- Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
February 12th, 2014
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
- Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
February 11th, 2014
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
- Jean de La Bruyère
February 10th, 2014
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell
February 7th, 2014
“I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody.”
- Benjamin Franklin
February 6th, 2014
“To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”
- Winston Churchill
February 5th, 2014
“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”
- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
February 4th, 2014
“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
February 3rd, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
- Willa Cather
January 31st, 2014
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
January 30th, 2014
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
- William Morris
January 29th, 2014
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
- Marcus Aurelius
January 28th, 2014
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
- Robert Southey
January 27th, 2014
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
- Virginia Woolf
January 24th, 2014
“Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk’s life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.”
- Thomas Merton
January 23rd, 2014
“Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”
- Samuel Johnson
January 22nd, 2014
“We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.”
- Benjamin Franklin
January 21st, 2014
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
- Samuel Butler
January 20th, 2014
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
- Flannery O’Connor
January 17th, 2014
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
January 16th, 2014
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
- Oscar Wilde
January 15th, 2014
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
- Marcus Aurelius
January 14th, 2014
“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”
- Leonardo da Vinci
January 13th, 2014
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
January 10th, 2014
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
- C.S. Lewis
January 9th, 2014
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
- Benjamin Franklin
January 8th, 2014
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
- Diane Arbus
January 7th, 2014
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
- Willa Cather
January 6th, 2014
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
- Euripide
January 3rd, 2014
“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.”
- Twyla Tharp
January 2nd, 2014
“Love is patient, love is kind, It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
- 1 Corinthians 13:4-5
January 1st, 2014
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
December 31st, 2013
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
- Samuel Butler
December 30th, 2013
“What is one’s personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.”
- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
December 27th, 2013
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
- Mary McCarthy
December 26th, 2013
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
- Sarah Bernhardt
December 25th, 2013
“The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”
- Bertrand Russell
December 24th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
- George Moore
December 23rd, 2013
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
December 20th, 2013
“The pleasure of doing a thing in the same way at the same time every day, and savoring it, should be noted.”
- Arnold Bennett
December 19th, 2013
“Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. Only do that which insists on being done and runs right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you do it.”
- Samuel Butler
December 18th, 2013
“But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.”
- George Orwell
December 17th, 2013
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.”
- Samuel Johnson
December 16th, 2013
“It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness.”
- Thomas Jefferson
December 13th, 2013
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
- Eudora Welty
December 12th, 2013
“We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.”
- Geoffrey Wolff, A Day at the Beach, “Apprentice”
December 11th, 2013
“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”
- C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
December 10th, 2013
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
- Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
December 9th, 2013
“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
- Charlie Parker
December 6th, 2013
“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”
- Charlie Parker
December 5th, 2013
“We are so accustomed to disguising our true nature from others, that we end up disguising it from ourselves.”
- La Rochefoucauld
December 4th, 2013
“I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”
- Flannery O’Connor
December 3rd, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
- Willa Cather
December 2nd, 2013
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
- St. Therese of Lisieux
November 29th, 2013
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”
- Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self
November 28th, 2013
“Most of us are experts at solving other people’s problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.”
- Nan Fairbrother, The House in the Country
November 27th, 2013
“What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like beach and massage when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can’t get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.”
- Ann Patchett, “Do Not Disturb,” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
November 26th, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
- Publilius Syrus
November 25th, 2013
“I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”
- C.S. Lewis, Letters, January 20 1942
November 22nd, 2013
“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.”
- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
November 21st, 2013
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere…. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not speak here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
- G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg”
November 20th, 2013
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell
November 19th, 2013
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
- Oscar Wilde
November 18th, 2013
“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
November 15th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell
November 14th, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
- G.K. Chesterton
November 13th, 2013
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
- Iris Murdoch
November 12th, 2013
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
- William James
November 8th, 2013
“Meanwhile, as we read, two little girls slept as if couched on zephyrs on the south side of the parlor floor, in a room that had bunny wallpaper…and a bookcase crammed with the collected Beatrix Potter. Snow White was in a youth bed and Rose Red was in a crib, and next to them was the little blue and white guest room that one of them would have one day. Because I recognize emotions only in retrospect, I didn’t know that I was happy. As always, there was something nagging at my mind’s corners. But I did know that I had all that it is proper in this world to wish for.”
- Mary Cantwell
November 7th, 2013
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other; where freedom and fondness, mutual raillery and mutual kindness, shew that no opposition of interest divides the brothers, nor any rivalship of favors sets the sisters at variance, and where everything presents us with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and contentment?”
- Adam Smith
November 6th, 2013
“Arrears of small things to be attended to, if allowed to accumulate, worry and depress like unpaid debts. The main work should always stand aside for these, not these for the main work, as large debts should stand aside for small ones, or truth for common charity and good feeling. If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”
- Samuel Butler
November 5th, 2013
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
- Elias Canetti
November 4th, 2013
“…every life has at least one fairy palace in its span. Usually these miracles happen when a person is young, but still wide-eyed enough to catch the magic that older people have forgotten or pushed away. For countless children, Disneyland has it…For both tourists and natives, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace does well…prancing horses, flashing sabers, plumes and capes and trumpets in the fog…the Palace is in safe hands, a solid dream.
Sometimes people can know two palaces before Lady Luck calls it quits, but of course they are never of equal enchantment…[For me] the lesser of the two palaces was the Pig’n’Whisle, a stylish ice-cream parlor in Los Angeles.”
- M. F. K. Fisher
November 1st, 2013
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
- Joseph Addison
October 31st, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
- Willa Cather
October 30th, 2013
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
- Jean de La Bruyère
October 29th, 2013
“We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.”
- Schopenhauer
October 28th, 2013
“If better were within, better would come out.”
- Simon Patrick
October 25th, 2013
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
- Samuel Johnson
October 24th, 2013
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
- Leo Tolstoy
October 23rd, 2013
“Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, ‘I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”
- Hans Christian Andersen, Ugly Duckling
October 22nd, 2013
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
October 21st, 2013
“Optimism is true moral courage.”
- Ernest Shackleton
October 18th, 2013
“I like my town but I can’t say exactly what I like about it. I don’t think it’s the smell. I’m too accustomed to the monuments to want to look at them. I like certain lights, a few bridges, café terraces. I love passing through a place I haven’t seen for a long time.”
- Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, “The Town”
October 17th, 2013
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
- Oscar Wilde
October 16th, 2013
“The mind…is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness.”
- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
October 15th, 2013
“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
October 14th, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
October 11th, 2013
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
- John Ruskin
October 10th, 2013
“Imaginary evil is romantic & varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
- Simone Weil
October 9th, 2013
“In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.”
- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
October 8th, 2013
“I only study the things I like; I apply my mind only to matters that interest me. They’ll be useful—or useless—to me or to others in due course, I’ll be given—or not given—the opportunity of benefiting from what I’ve learned. In any case, I’ll have enjoyed the inestimable advantage of doing things I like doing and following my own inclinations.”
- Nicolas de Chamfort
October 7th, 2013
“There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one.”
- Jerome K. Jerome
October 4th, 2013
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; –from fear of its being abused.”
- Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson
October 3rd, 2013
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”
- Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self
October 2nd, 2013
“Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.
Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.”
- Christopher Alexander
October 1st, 2013
“And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.”
- John Updike, Self-Consciousness
September 30th, 2013
“It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity—this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.”
- Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
September 27th, 2013
“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”
- Proverbs 19:11
September 26th, 2013
“If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”
- Flannery O’Connor, letter to “A,” 10 Feb 62
September 25th, 2013
“A stumble may prevent a fall.”
- Thomas Fuller, proverb
September 24th, 2013
“Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.”
- C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
September 23rd, 2013
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
September 20th, 2013
“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
- Kierkegaard, letter, 1847
September 19th, 2013
“Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.”
- Aristotle, Rhetoric
September 18th, 2013
“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
September 17th, 2013“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work…that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself…. The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”
- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
September 16th, 2013
“Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?”
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
September 13th, 2013
“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”
- St. Therese of Lisieux
September 12th, 2013
“There can be no joy in living without joy in work.”
- St. Thomas Aquinas
September 11th, 2013
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
- Samuel Johnson
September 10th, 2013
“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
September 9th, 2013
“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”
- William Wordsworth
September 6th, 2013
“My greatest skill has been to want but little.”
- Henry David Thoreau
September 5th, 2013
“Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”
- Francis Bacon
September 4th, 2013
“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
- Flannery O’Connor
September 3rd, 2013
“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.”
- Benjamin Franklin
September 2nd, 2013
“When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
August 30th, 2013
“To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.”
- Winston Churchill
August 29th, 2013
“There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance.”
- Louis Auchincloss
August 28th, 2013
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
- William Morris
August 27th, 2013
“All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.”
- Matthew Arnold
August 26th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
- Gertrude Stein
August 23rd, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
- Publius Syrus
August 22nd, 2013
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
August 21st, 2013
“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”
- Goethe
August 20th, 2013
“Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back.”
- Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver
August 19th, 2013
“The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else.”
- Eric Hoffer
August 16th, 2013
“Crimes are encouraged by overlooking petty offenses.”
- Publius Syrus
August 15th, 2013
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
- Diane Arbus
August 14th, 2013
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
August 13th, 2013
“There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished…Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.”
- Eric Hoffer
August 12th, 2013
“Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back.”
- Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver
August 9th, 2013
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
- Madame de la Fayette
August 8th, 2013
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
- Samuel Butler
August 7th, 2013
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
- Euripides
August 6th, 2013
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
August 5th, 2013
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you.”
- Jean de La Brùyere
August 2nd, 2013
“The Little House was very happy as she sat on the hill and watched the countryside around her. She watched the sun rise in the morning and she watched the sun set in the evening. Day followed day, each one a little different from the one before . . . but the Little House stayed just the same.”
- Virginia Lee Burton, The Little House
August 1st, 2013
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
- Logan Pearsall Smith
July 31st, 2013
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
- Simone Weil
July 30th, 2013
“One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.”
- Elias Canetti
July 29th, 2013
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
July 26th, 2013
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.”
- Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
July 25th, 2013
“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
July 24th, 2013
“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
July 23rd, 2013
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”
- Diane Arbus
July 22nd, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
- Emily Dickinson, letter
July 18th, 2013
“Where Thou art—that—is Home—.”
- Emily Dickinson
July 17th, 2013
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
July 16th, 2013
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
- Diane Arbus
July 15th, 2013
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
- William Morris
July 12th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
- Gertrude Stein
July 11th, 2013
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
- Robert Southey
July 10th, 2013
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
- Virginia Woolf
July 9th, 2013
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
- Benjamin Franklin
July 8th, 2013
“The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.”
- Samuel Johnson
July 5th, 2013
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
July 4th, 2013
“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.”
- Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
July 3rd, 2013
“Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.”
- Goethe
July 2nd, 2013
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.”
- The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
July 1st, 2013
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”
- Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary
June 28th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
- Bertrand Russell
June 27th, 2013
“A merry heart doeth good [like] a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
- Proverbs 17:22
June 26th, 2013
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
- Andy Warhol
June 25th, 2013
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
- Giacometti
June 24th, 2013
“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.”
- Samuel Johnson
June 21st, 2013
“There is something in living close to the great elemental forces of nature that causes people to rise above small annoyances and discomforts.”
- Laura Ingalls Wilder, essay, February 1917
June 20th, 2013
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
June 19th, 2013
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. 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.”
- Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
June 18th, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
- Emily Dickinson, letter
June 17th, 2013
“To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
June 14th, 2013
“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it.”
- John Ruskin
June 13th, 2013
“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.”
- William Butler Yeats
June 12th, 2013
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
- Elias Canetti
June 11th, 2013
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
- Flannery O’Connor
June 10th, 2013
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
- Buddha
June 7th, 2013
“We are all born for love…It is the principle of existence, and its only end.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
June 6th, 2013
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
June 5th, 2013
“The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.”
- Samuel Johnson
June 4th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
- George Moore
June 3rd, 2013
“Stay, stay at home, my heart and rest; Home-keeping hearts are the happiest, For those that wander they know not where Are full of trouble and full of care; To stay at home is best.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
May 31st, 2013
“After all, a vacation is not a matter of place or time. We can take a wonderful vacation in spirit, even though we are obliged to stay at home, if we will only drop our burdens from our minds for a while. But no amount of travel will give us rest and recreation if we carry our work and worries with us.”
- Laura Ingalls Wilder, essay September 1919
May 30th, 2013
“Forever — is composed of nows –”
- Emily Dickinson
May 29th, 2013
“Quitting smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know. I’ve done it a thousand times.”
- Mark Twain
May 28th, 2013
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”
- Oscar Wilde
May 27th, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
- G.K. Chesterton
May 24th, 2013
“The greatest of empires, is the empire over one’s self.”
-Publius Syrus
May 23rd, 2013
“Best is good. Better is best.”
-Lisa Grunwald
May 22, 2013
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
-Emily Dickinson, letter
May 21st, 2013
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined, but I had the Satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”
-Benjamin Franklin
May 20th, 2013
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
May 17th, 2013
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
May 16th, 2013
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
May 15th, 2013
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
May 14th, 2013
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
May 13th, 2013
“How often things occur by mere chance which we dared not even hope for.”
-Terence
May 10th, 2013
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 9th, 2013
“The sacrifice of pleasures is of course itself a pleasure.”
-Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent
May 8th, 2013
“Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself, than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.”
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
May 7th, 2013
“She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it).”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
May 6th, 2013
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”
-Oscar Wilde
May 3rd, 2013
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
-G.K. Chesterton
May 2nd, 2013
“I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.”
-Simone Weil, Waiting For God
May 1st, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
April 30th, 2013
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
-Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
April 29th, 2013
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
-Samuel Johnson
April 26th, 2013
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
-William Morris
April 25th, 2013
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein
April 24th, 2013
“We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.”
-Publius Syrus
April 23rd, 2013
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius
April 22nd, 2013
“Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”
-Virginia Woolf
April 19th, 2013
“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them.”
-Robert Southey
April 18th, 2013
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
-William Morris
April 17th, 2013
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
-Virginia Woolf
April 16th, 2013
“There is almost one time that is important— Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
-Leo Tolstoy
April 15th, 2013
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
-James Baldwin, Paris Review Interviews II
April 12th, 2013
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.”
-Thomas Merton
April 11th, 2013
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes’. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
-Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
April 10th, 2013
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
April 9th, 2013
“He who chases two hares will catch neither.”
-Publius Syrus
April 8th, 2013
“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”
-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
April 5th, 2013
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
-Benjamin Franklin
April 4th, 2013
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
-George Moore
April 3rd, 2013
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
-William Butler Yeats
April 2nd, 2013
“A man is not only happy but wise also, if he is trying, during his lifetime, to be the sort of man he wants to be found at his death.”
-Thomas à Kempis
April 1st, 2013
“The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.”
-Samuel Johnson
March 28th, 2013
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
-William Blake
March 27th, 2013
“I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organise and concentrate—or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my ‘ten minutes’. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.”
-Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
March 26th, 2013
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.”
-Samuel Johnson
March 25th, 2013
“We are interested in others, when they are interested in us.”
-Publius Syrus
March 22nd, 2013
“Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.”
-Goethe
March 21st, 2013
“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
-Francis Bacon
March 20th, 2013
“To create a little flower is the labour of ages.”
-William Blake
March 19th, 2013
“It is folly for him to rule over others who cannot govern himself.”
-Publius Syrus
March 18th, 2o13
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
March 14th, 2013
“I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.”
-Henry David Thoreau
March 13th, 2013
“Routine shortens and variety lengthens time, and it is therefore in the power of men to do something to regulate its pace. A life with many landmarks, a life which is much subdivided when those subdivisions are not of the same kind, and when new and diverse interests, impressions, and labours follow each other in swift and distinct successions, seems the most long…”
-Lecky, The Map of Life
March 12th, 2013
“One should not wish anyone disagreeable conditions of life; but for him who is involved in them by chance, they are touchstones of characters and of the most decisive value to man.”
-Goethe
March 11th, 2013
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. 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.”
-Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meanin
March 8th, 2013
“Now run along and play, but don’t get into trouble. George promised to be good. But it is easy for little monkeys to forget.”
-H.A. Rey, Curious George
March 7th, 2013
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. . . Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis
March 6th, 2013
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
-Iris Murdoch
March 5th, 2013
“The cut worm forgives the plow.”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
March 4th, 2013
“In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.”
-Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary
March 1st, 2013
“Choose which seems best and, in the doing, it will become agreeable and easy.”
-Pythagoras
February 28th, 2013
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy
February 27th, 2013
“If better were within, better would come out.”
-Simon Patrick
February 26th, 2013
“He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried. You would not call such a man rich, neither would I call happy the man who is so without realizing it.”
-Eugène Delacroix
February 25th, 2013
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
February 22nd, 2013
“We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack.”
-Schopenhauer
February 21st, 2013
“Children think not of what is past, nor what is to come, but enjoy the present time, which few of us do.”
-Jean de La Bruyère
February 20th, 2013
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
-Willa Cather
February 19th, 2013
“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
February 18th, 2013
“Begin by instructing yourself, then you will receive instruction from others.”
-Goethe
February 15th, 2013
“Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
February 14th, 2013
“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.”
-Rousseau, The Social Contract
February 13th, 2013
“Silence was the cure, if only temporarily, silence and geography. But of what was I being cured? I do not know, have never known. I only know the cure. Silence, and no connections except to landscape.”
-Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
February 12th, 2013
“Optimism is true moral courage.”
-Ernest Shackleton
February 11th, 2013
“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
-Joseph Addison
February 8th, 2013
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”
-Epicurus
February 7th, 2013
“How can we learn self-knowledge? Never by taking thought but rather by action. Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re like.”
-Goethe
February 6th, 2013
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
-Leo Tolstoy
February 5th, 2013
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”
-Winston Churchill
February 4th, 2013
“It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
February 1st, 2013
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
January 31st, 2013
“I had wanted to come back to Greenwich Village ever since I had left Waverly Place, and since moving to West Eleventh Street, I have never lived anyplace else. I do not want to. That is not because of what the Village is but because of what I have made it, and what I have made it depends on who I am at the time.”
-Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young
January 30th, 2013
“He who is and remains true to himself and to others has the most attractive quality of the greatest talent.”
-Goethe
January 29th, 2013
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
-Leo Tolstoy
January 28th, 2013
“He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.”
-Samuel Johnson
January 25th, 2013
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”
-Carl Jung
January 24th, 2013
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
-Madame de la Fayette
January 23rd, 2013
“No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”
-John Ruskin
January 22nd, 2013
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
-Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
January 21st, 2013
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
January 18th, 2013
“The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.”
-Joseph Addison
January 17th, 2013
“What lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”
-Aristotle
January 16th, 2013
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
-George Santayana
January 15th, 2013
“That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure, whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases ultimately dominate.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
January 14th, 2013
“The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.”
-Goethe
January 11th, 2013
“With what pleasure do we look upon a family, through the whole of which reign mutual love and esteem, where the parents and children are companions for one another, without any other difference than what is made by respectful affection on the one side, and kind indulgence on the other.”
-Adam Smith
January 10th, 2013
“Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognize his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognize that this power is not unlimited.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
January 9th, 2013
“His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.”
-Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand
January 8th, 2013
“The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.”
-Goethe
January 7th, 2013
“Sir, you must not neglect doing a thing immediately good from fear of remote evil; from fear of its being abused.”
-Samuel Johnson
January 4th, 2013
“The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”
-Montaigne
January 3rd, 2013
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
January 2nd, 2013
“They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
-Andy Warhol
January 1st, 2013
“Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.”
-Walt Whitman
December 31st, 2012
“If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.”
-Leo Tolstoy
December 28th, 2012
“Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
December 27th, 2012
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
December 26th, 2012
“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
-Confucious
December 25th, 2012
“Exuberance is beauty.”
-William Blake
December 24th, 2012
“Things do not change; we change.”
-Henry David Thoreau
December 21st, 2012
“When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might want to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They all had all that they wanted.”
-William Steig, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
December 20th, 2012
“…the man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of works.”
-Adam Smith
December 19th, 2012
“There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.”
-Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self
December 18th, 2012
“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
-Carl Jung
December 17th, 2012
“Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.
Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.”
-Christopher Alexander
December 14th, 2012
“A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”
-Eudora Welty
December 13th, 2012
“Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.”
-The Map of Life, William Edward Hartpole Lecky
December 12th, 2012
“Associate with people who are likely to improve you.”
-Seneca
December 11th, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler
December 10th, 2012
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
-Benjamin Franklin
December 7th, 2012
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
December 6th, 2012
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
-Euripides
December 5th, 2012
“Happiness is a place between too much and too little.”
-Finnish proverb
December 4th, 2012
“It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
December 3rd, 2012
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
-Bertrand Russell
November 29th, 2012
“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
-Buddha
November 28th, 2012
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
-William James
November 27th, 2012
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
-Marcus Aurelius
November 26th, 2012
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its own focus.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 23rd, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of the outward conditions.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
November 22nd, 2012
“To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.”
-Samuel Johnson
November 21st, 2012
“One lives in the naive notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.”
-Elias Canetti
November 20th, 2012
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
-Simone Weil
November 19th, 2012
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith
November 16th, 2012
“Where Thou art-that-is Home.”
-Emily Dickinson
November 15th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”
-Madame du Chatelet
November 14th, 2012
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 13th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca
November 12th, 2012
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
-Diane Arbus
November 9th, 2012
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
-William Morris
November 8th, 2012
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein
November 7th, 2012
“What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.”
-Samuel Johnson
November 6th, 2012
“Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time.”
-Henry David Thoreau
November 5th, 2012
“Read at whim! Read at whim!”
-Randall Jarrell
November 2nd, 2012
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius
November 1st, 2012
“Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
October 31st, 2012
“’Safe! safe! safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’”
-Virginia Woolf
October 30th, 2012
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire
October 29th, 2012
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
-William Morris
October 26th, 2012
“My mind work in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
-Virginia Woolf
October 25th, 2012
“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.”
-Thomas Merton
October 24th, 2012
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
-George Moore
October 23rd, 2012
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
-William Butler Yeats
October 22nd, 2012
“The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.”
-Samuel Johnson
October 19th, 2012
“Each time of life has its own kind of love.”
-Leo Tolstoy
October 18th, 2012
“A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.”
-Proverbs 19:11
October 17th, 2012
“For the love of God and my sisters (so charitable towards me) I take care to appear happy and especially to be so.”
-St. Therese of Lisieux
October 16th, 2012
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends…”
-Samuel Johnson
October 15th, 2012
“It is much easier to extinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.”
-La Rochefoucauld
October 12th, 2012
“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends…”
-Samuel Johnson
October 11th, 2012
“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
-Flannery O’Connor
October 10th, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler
October 9th, 2012
“We prefer to see those to whom we do good than those who do good to us.”
-La Rochefoucauld
October 8th, 2012
“Order is heaven’s first law.”
-Alexander Pope
October 5th, 2012
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
October 4th, 2012
“…that best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”
-William Wordsworth
October 3rd, 2012
“But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.”
-Virginia Woolf
October 2nd, 2012
“Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.”
-Samuel Johnson
October 1st, 2012
“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”
-Walt Whitman
September 28th, 2012
“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.”
-Jane Austen
September 27th, 2012
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
-Henry David Thoreau
September 26th, 2012
“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
September 25th, 2012
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
-William Shakespeare
September 24th, 2012
“Our life is the creation of our mind.”
-Buddha
September 20th, 2012
“Choose what is best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.”
-Plutarch
September 19th, 2012
“You can observe a lot by watching.”
-Yogi Berra
September 18th, 2012
“For surely to be wise is the most desirable thing in all the world.”
-Cicero
September 17th, 2012
“Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.”
-Michel de Montaigne
September 14th, 2012
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
September 13th, 2012
“Everyone thinking of changing the world, buy no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy
September 12th, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson
September 11th, 2012
“To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
-Oscar Wilde
September 10th, 2012
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ectasy at your feet.”
-Franz Kafka
September 7th, 2012
“Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.”
-Diane Arbus
September 6th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers. ”
-Madame du Chatelet
September 5th, 2012
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
-William Morris
September 4th, 2012
“The only cure [for envy] in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness, and the difficulty is that envy is itself a terrible obstacle to happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
September 3rd, 2012
“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for.”
-Oscar Wilde
August 31, 2012
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”
-W.H. Sheldon
August 30th, 2012
“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
August 29th, 2012
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
-George Eliot
August 28th, 2012
“To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
August 27th, 2012
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
-Ayn Rand
August 24th, 2012
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
-Mary McCarthy
August 23rd, 2012
“To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.”
-Oscar Wilde
August 22nd, 2012
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis
August 21st, 2012
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.”
-Disraeli
August 20th, 2012
“Man’s life is a progress, not a station.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
August 17th, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the dominance of outward conditions.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
August 16th, 2012
“Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.”
-W.H. Sheldon
August 15th, 2012
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
-Guillaume Appollinaire
August 14th, 2012
“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”
-Lin Yutang
August 13th, 2012
“This is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
-Willa Cather
August 10th, 2012
“It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.”
-Bernard Berenson
August 9th, 2012
“Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I always do at least two things at once. It’s easier to forget something you only half-did or quarter did.”
-Andy Warhol
August 8th, 2012
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”
-Bertrand Russell
August 7th, 2012
“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”
-St. Therese of Lisieux
August 6th, 2012
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire
August 3rd, 2012
“Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor’s of the mind.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
August 2nd, 2012
“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.”
-Mary McCarthy
August 1st, 2012
“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
-Goethe
July 31st, 2012
“A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”
-Sydney Smith
July 30th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca
July 27th, 2012
“To have management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let [a man] take a course of chemistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself.”
-Samuel Johnson
July 26th, 2012
“I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.”
-Alberto Giacometti
July 25th, 2012
“Sometimes something can look beautiful just because it’s different in some way from the other things around it. One red petunia in a window box will look very beautiful if all the rest of them are white, and vice-versa.”
-Andy Warhol
July 24, 2012
“Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.”
-Bertrand Russell
July 23st, 2012
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
-Sarah Bernhardt
July 20th, 2012
“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
-Gertrude Stein
July 19th, 2012
“…the true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life…”
-William Morris
July 18th, 2012
“It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it…The shorter my possession of life the deeper and fuller I must make it.”
-Michel de Montaigne
July 17th, 2012
“Happiness is a place between too much and too little.”
-Finnish proverb
July 16th, 2012
“To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.”
-Samuel Johnson
July 13th, 2012
“As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.”
-Andy Warhol
July 12th, 2012
“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”
-Bertrand Russell
July 11th, 2012
“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
-Carl Jung
July 10th, 2012
“Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.”
-Marcus Aurelius
July 9th, 2012
“All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.”
-Samuel Johnson
July 6th, 2012
“It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new.”
-Democritus
July 5th, 2012
“I love the broad margin to my life.”
-Henry David Thoreau
July 4th, 2012
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
-Simone Weil
July 3rd, 2012
“A man is not only happy but wise also, if he is trying, during his lifetime, to be the sort of man he wants to be found at his death.”
-Thomas à Kempis
July 2nd, 2012
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
-Buddha
June 29th, 2012
“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.”
-Andy Warhol
June 28th, 2012
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
June 27th, 2012
“A merry heart doeth good [like] a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
-Proverbs 17:22
June 26th, 2012
“One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”
-Simone Weil
June 25th, 2012
“Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.”
-Bertrand Russell
June 22nd, 2012
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
-William James
June 21st, 2012
“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable suprises.”
-M.F.K. Fisher
June 20th, 2012
“The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.”
-Bertrand Russell
June 19th, 2012
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
June 18th, 2012
“The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.”
-Abraham Lincoln
June 15th, 2012
“Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.”
-Thomas Carlyle
June 14th, 2012
“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
-Logan Pearsall Smith
June 13th, 2012
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
-Elias Canetti
June 12, 2012
“If we did not have pride, we would not complain of it in others.”
-La Rochefoucauld
June 11, 2012
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”
-Voltaire
June 8th, 2012
“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
-Confucious
June 7th, 2012
“Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.”
-Samuel Johnson
June 6th, 2012
“What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do.”
-Aristotle
June 5th, 2012
“All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.”
-William James
June 4th, 2012
“There is almost one time that is important – Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power.”
-Leo Tolstoy
June 1st, 2012
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
-George Santayana
May 31, 2012
“The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”
-G.K. Chesterton
May 30th, 2012
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
May 29th, 2012
“As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.”
-Samuel Johnson
May 28th, 2012
“It is easier to resist at the begining than at the end.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
May 25th, 2012
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
-Bertrand Russell
May 24th, 2012
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy
May 23nd, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson
May 22nd, 2012
“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius
May 21st, 2012
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
-Iris Murdoch
May 18th, 2012
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”
-C.S. Lewis
May 17th, 2012
“As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.”
-Andy Warhol
May 16th, 2012
“Choose which seems best and, in the doing, it will become agreeable and easy.”
-Pythagoras
May 15th, 2012
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.”
-Benjamin Disraeli
May 14th, 2012
“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
-Romans 7: 15-16
May 11th, 2012
“A comfortable home is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.”
-Sydney Smith
May 10th, 2012
“Life is not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 9th, 2012
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.”
-Seneca
May 8th, 2012
“Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.”
-Benjamin Franklin
May 7th, 2012
“Home was quite a place when people stayed there.”
-E.B. White
May 4th, 2012
“Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.”
-Samuel Johnson
May 3rd, 2012
“The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-Samuel Butler
May 2nd, 2012
“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”
-Buddha
May 1st, 2012
“It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light.”
-G.K. Chesterton
April 30th, 2012
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”
-Leonardo da Vinci
April 27th, 2012
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
-George Moore
April 26th, 2012
“Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.”
-Carl Jung
April 25th, 2012
“We needs must love the highest when we see it.”
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
April 24th, 2012
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
April 23rd, 2012
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before.”
-Diane Arbus
April 20th, 2012
“If you make it a habit not to blame others, you will feel the growth of the ability to love in your soul, and you will see the growth of goodness in your life.”
— Leo Tolstoy
April 19th, 2012
“The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largly freed, from the dominance of outward conditions.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
April 18th, 2012
“The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.”
— Samuel Johnson
April 17th, 2012
“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”
— Madame du Chatelet
April 16th, 2012
“They always say that times changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
— Andy Warhol
April 13th, 2012
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
— Willa Cather
April 12th, 2012
“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”
— John Cage
April 11th, 2012
“Optimism is true moral courage.”
— Ernest Shackleton
April 10th, 2012
“The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you.”
— La Bruyere
April 9th, 2012
“Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:4-5
April 6th, 2012
“If one thinks that one is happy, that is enough to be happy.”
— Madame de la Fayette
April 5th, 2012
“Enough is abundance to the wise.”
— Euripide
April 4th, 2012
“Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.”
— Samuel Johnson
April 3rd, 2012
“All wisdom is not new wisdom.”
— Winston Churchill
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