"If you do not raise your eyes you will think that you are at the highest point." -- Antonio Porchia

"Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life interesting." -- L. M. Montgomery

"Procrastination is the thief of time." -- Edward Young

"Order is the shape upon which beauty depends." -- Pearl S. Buck

"Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment." -- Oprah Winfrey

"It's character that communicates most eloquently." -- Stephen R. Covey, from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself." -- Samuel Butler

"We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself; it smites us into darkness." -- John Milton

"When you don't know what you want, you often end up where you don't want to be." -- Bob Greene

"We are all pilgrims on the same journey -- but some pilgrims have better road maps." -- Nelson DeMille

"Seek to make thy course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect." -- Francis Bacon

"Seeing's believing, but seeing's the truth." -- Thomas Fuller

"Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason." -- Jerry Seinfeld

"The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be rurned into momentum." -- Frances Willard

"Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give I give to myself." -- Walt Whitman

"A window of opportunity won't open itself." -- Dave Weinbaum

"In my life's chain of events nothing was accidental. Everything happened according to an inner need." -- Hannah Senesh

"The manner of giving is worth more than the gift." -- Pierre Corneille

"I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame." -- Pearl S. Buck

"The habit of being uniformly considerate toward others will bring increased happiness to you." -- Grenville Kleiser

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated." -- Paul Anderson

"A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference." -- A.A. Milne, from The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh

"If you want to know where the apathy is, you're probably sitting on it." -- Florynce R. Kennedy

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces." -- George Santayana

"Hope is itself a species happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords." -- Samuel Johnson

"Remembrance is the secret of reconciliation." -- Rudolf Scharping

"It is never any good dwelling on goodbyes. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting." -- Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy Bibescu

Injustice is a Threat to Justice

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Just when you think that a person is just a backdrop for the rest of the universe, watch them and see that they laugh, they cry, they tell jokes ... they're just friends waiting to be made." -- Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein

"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident." -- Charles Lamb

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"One is never as happy or as unhappy as one thinks." -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"A friend is, as it were, a second self." -- Cicero

"There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail." -- Eric Hoffer

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." -- W. E. B. Du Bois

"A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees." -- William Blake

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Nothing is more vulgar than haste." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The only way to help yourself is to help others." -- Elbert Hubbard

"It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well." -- Descartes

"Beginning reform is beginning revolution." -- Duke of Wellington

"Reform must come from within, not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue." -- James Cardinal Gibbons

"Gratitude is the memory of the heart." -- Jean Baptiste Massieu

"It is not enough to do good; one must do it the right way." -- John Morley

"Silence may be as variously shaded as speech." -- Edith Wharton

"Hard work never killed a man but it sure has scared a lot of them." -- Author Unknown

"The best of healers is good cheer." -- Pindar

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." -- Harper Lee

"Invention breeds invention." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Work | "Absence of occupation is not rest; A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed." -- William Cowper

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." -- Aesop

"And God, who studies each separate soul,
Out of commonplace lives makes His beautiful whole."
-- Susan Coolidge

"Don't wait for your 'ship to come in,' and feel angry and cheated when it doesn't. Get going with something small." -- Norman Vincent Peale

"A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction." -- Nathaniel L. Branden

"If you're proactive, you don't have to wait for circumstances or other people to create perspective-expanding experiences. You can consciously create your own." -- Stephen R. Covey

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it." -- Helen Keller

"An ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness." -- Elbert Hubbard

"Science is the topography of ignorance." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The world of poetry, mythology, and religion represents the world as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it." -- Joseph Wood Krutch

"Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions." -- Psalm 35:17

"Each of us wages a private battle each day between the grand fantasies we have for ourselves and what actually happens." -- Cathy Guisewite, creator of the comic strip Cathy

"Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is right, then the world is crazy. Well, Einstein was right. The world is crazy." -- Daniel Greenberger

Writing | "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode to a Graecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." -- William Faulkner

"Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist." -- Wallace Stevens

"When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all." -- Edward O. Wilson

"Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world. There is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things." -- Frank Zappa

"When you blame others, you give up a perfect opportunity to change." -- Stephen R. Covey

"Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift." -- Camille Paglia

"The true wonder of the world is available everywhere, in the minutest parts of our bodies, in the vast expanses of the cosmos, and in the interconnectedness of these and all things." -- Michael Stark

Procrastination | "The only way to get myself moving on things I've been putting off is to logically think through the negative consequences that have resulted when I've procrastinated about something similar in the past. If the negative consequences were disproportionately large compared to actually doing the damn thing, then I can get myself to do it." -- Hal F., executive coach

"Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life." -- John Updike

"Reason must sit at the knee of instinct and learn reverence for the miraculous instinctual capacity for creation." -- Jonathan Schell

"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the reason for which we sought it has passed." -- Ellen Glasgow

"I don't know how it is that you start working at something that you don't like, and before you know it you're an old man." -- Herman Mankiewicz

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-- T. S. Eliot

"It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion." -- Rebecca West

"Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence." -- H.L. Mencken (from Russ Kick's website)

Writing | "An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said, 'There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.' This distinction seem to me to go to the root of the matter." -- Henry James

"Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Fame is proof that people are gullible." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Humility | "Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more." -- John Updike

"A letter has a dignity unequaled by electronic correspondence, and quality stationery further elevates its importance." -- Peter Post, from The Etiquette Advantage In Business, by Peggy Post and Peter Post

Writing | "While many things are too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened." -- Thomas Hardy

"Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them." -- Russell H. Conwell

"Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do." -- Eric Hoffer

"We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to explain ourselves in these mechanistic terms...the result might be hard to accept." -- Edward O. Wilson

"A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour." -- Elbert Hubbard

"All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy." -- Ernest Dimmet

"Atoms for peace. Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth." -- David Sarnoff

"The art of leadership is to work with the natural grain of the particular wood of humanity which comes to hand." -- John Adair

"Don't be defeated by a self-fulfilling prophecy that your interruptions can't be controlled." -- Jack D. Ferner

Writing | "There are no dull subjects.
There are only dull writers." -- H. L. Mencken

Writing | "The immature poet steals; the mature poet plagiarizes." -- T. S. Eliot

Writing | "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal." -- Lionel Trilling

"It is character that communicates most eloquently." -- Stephen R. Covey, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Writing | "And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of Plot."
-- Edgar Allan Poe

"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose." -- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ essentially from the millions of the rest of us who walk upon this earth." -- Erich Fromm

"Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance." -- Fredrich von Schiller

"He pasted picture postcards around goldfish bowls to make the goldfish think they were going places." -- Fred Allen

"I don't think I've used a hanger in my entire life. I have always enjoyed living in my own debris." -- Steven Spielberg

"We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations -- we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together." -- Rodney Dangerfield

Writing | "Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him." -- Mark Twain

"Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed." -- legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone (from Russ Kick's website)

"We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom, and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace, more about killing than we do about living." -- Gen. Omar Bradley

Writing | "The mystery story is really two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen." -- Mary Roberts Rinehart

"A man finds joy in giving an apt reply -- and how good is a timely word!" -- Proverbs 15:23

"The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." -- Jack London

"Never pretend to be someone you're not. And whatever you do, don't be a mystery to people." -- Eunice Azzani

"Love - the feeling - is a fruit of love, the verb." -- Stephen R. Covey

"There can be no friendship without confidence and no confidence without integrity." -- Samuel Johnson

"It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law." -- Cecil B. DeMille

Writing | "The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." -- Oscar Wilde

"We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn that it is God shaking them." -- Charles West