"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." -- Thomas Sowell, via Boar's Head Tavern

"Not everything faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- J. Baldwin

"Think not those faithful who praise all thy words, but those who kindly reprove thy faults." -- Socrates

"What you praise you increase." -- Catherine Ponder

"If you want employees to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others." -- Haim Ginott

"David Gest, be a man. Stop trying to take that lady's money. She's earned that money ... You need to take a good look in the mirror. Go get a new plastic surgeon, and leave that woman alone!" -- Sharon Osbourne, TV talk show host, speaking out about the $10 million civil suit filed by producer David Gest against his estranged wife, Liza Minnelli, accusing her of spousal abuse, via Reuters Notable Quotes

"The core reductive mistake is...the idea of a single fundamental explanation." -- Mary Midgley

"Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen." --Leonardo da Vinci

"One would think that the earth was the road Of the body, that the sea was the road Of the soul." -- Juan Ramón Jiménez

"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts." -- Orson Welles, via the Jokes Jokes Jokes Joke and Humor Weblog

"On the human chessboard, all moves are possible." -- Miriam Schiff, via Career Impressions Newsletter | Resume to Referral

Responsibility | "While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us." -- Benjamin Franklin

"It's essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself." -- Barbara Sher

"There's nothing wrong with being realistic--as long as you create your own reality." -- Beth Mende Conny

"We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want." -- Lao-Tzu

"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

Synergy | "Use not only all the brains you have -- but all you can borrow." -- Woodrow Wilson, from the markerboard at the therapist's office

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

"There's really something subversive about it. To be talking dirty to America's sweetheart, you're really playing with something iconoclastic." -- Mark Ruffalo, on his dirty-talk sex scene with Meg Ryan in "In the Cut," quoted in USA Today, via Reuters Notable Quotes

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain, via email from Curt Rosengren, of Occupational Adventure (sm)

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

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me." -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from the game RSVP

"There is much pleasure gained from useless knowledge." -- Bertrand Russell, via email from Carla

"We judge of man's wisdom by his hope." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Hope is a waking dream." -- Aristotle

"Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory." — Norman Vincent Peale

"A zebra is a light-colored animal with dark stripes, not a dark one with light stripes." -- American Museum of Natural History

"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

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