Quotes For You

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. -Rainer Maria Rilke

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -Harold Whitman

Trying to create democracy at the point of a foreign bayonet was a fool's errand from the beginning. It can't be done. -Charley Reese, Conservative columnist

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. -Charles De Gaulle

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. -Henry David Throeau

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. -Henry David Thoreau

If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your overty bought a lifetime of days. -Annie Dillard, "Seeing," Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974

You do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. -Vaclav Havel, writer, philosopher, politician

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -Leonardo DaVinci

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. -Confucius

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life. -Robert Louis Stevenson

The true Indian sets no price upon either his property or his labor. His generosity is limited only by his strength and ability. He regards it as an honor to be selected for difficult or dangerous service and would think it shameful to ask for any reward, saying rather: Let the person I serve express his thanks according to his own bringing up and his sense of honor. -Ohiyesa of the Santee Sioux

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. -Lin Yutang

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. -Richard Bach

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition. -Indira Gandhi

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy. -Bette Davis

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. -Robert Frost

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade. -Henry Ward Beecher

When I was young I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work. -Bernard Shaw

Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven't planted. -David Bly

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work. -Bette Davis

Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing, that love of work is success. -David O. McKay