Life

“Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”
- Albert Camus

“And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
- Henry Ford

“In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.”
- Abraham J Heschel

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
- Thomas Edison

“Talk Sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
- Euripides

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”
- Tallulah Bankhead

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939

“This above all: To thine own self be true.”
- Shakespeare

“A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.”
- Soren Kierkegaard

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
- Emily Dickinson

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
- Andy Warhol

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
- Mark Twain

“The way to begin living the ideal life is to begin.”
- Elbert Hubbard

“The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.”
- Aesop

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

by Robert Frost

“Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, a touch that never hurts.”
- Charles Dickens

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith

“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”
- Indira Gandhi

“Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

“You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy.”
- Anonymous

“Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.”
- William Safire

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

by Wilfred Owen