May 2010 Quotations

"Someone once said life is hard. I say, compared to what?"
~~ Harvey Mackay

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

“There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.”
~~ Ed Howdershelt

“The cure for writer’s cramp is writer’s block.”
~~ Iñigo de Leon

"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be a chess player, not the chess piece."
~~ Ralph Charell

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them."
~~ Lou Holtz

"Love is something you do, not something you feel."
~~ Gordon Atkinson

"Think in the morning, act in the noon, read in the evening, and sleep at night."
~~ William Blake [1757–1827]

"The only thing high-definition television will do is provide sharper pictures of the garbage."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are always happy."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."
~~ Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]

"Becoming the champion is often the luck of the draw, but being a contender, a somebody with promise, is about hard work and character."
~~ Robert Lipsyte

"Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy."
~~ Janet Long

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."
~~ Robert A. Heinlein [1907-88]

"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
~~ Thomas J. Watson [1874-1956], founder of I.B.M.

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."
~~ Helen Keller [1880-1968]

"It is never too late to start early."
~~ Anonymous

"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work."
~~ Peter Drucker [1909-2005]

"Whether you think you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
~~ Henry Ford [1863-1947]

"If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up someplace else."
~~ Yogi Berra

"If you always do what you have always done then you'll always have what you've already got."
~~ Anthony Robbins

"Science is everything we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else."
~~ Donald Knuth

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
~~ Howard Aiken [1900-73]

"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."
~~ Muhammad Ali

"If everything's under control, you're going too slow."
~~ racecar driver Mario Andretti

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
~~ Will Rogers [1879-1935]

"Even when people are more successful than they had imagined, nothing is ever achieved without giving something up."
~~ Dr. Judith M. Bardwick

"Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire."
~~ Irish poet William Butler Yeats [1865-1939]

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae
(To know what to ask is already to know half)
~~ Aristotle [384-322 B.C.E.]

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
~~ Cyril Northcote Parkinson [1909-93] (aka "Parkinson's Law")

"Chance favors the trained mind."
~~ Louis Pasteur [1822-95]

"The value of the average conversation could be enormously improved by the constant use of four simple words: 'I do not know.'"
~~ André Maurois [1885-1967]

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
(Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound)
~~ Anonymous

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe."
~~ Lord Salisbury [1830-1903]

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1859-1915]

"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
~~ Matt Cartmill, PhD

"At age 65, this gettin' old thing is gettin' old."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"The bigger the goal, the bigger the obstacle. The bigger the obstacle, the bigger the achievement. So blame the failure not on obstacles but on the absence of relentless effort"
~~ Dr. Ravi Batra

"There is an art to science, and science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"This is my way. What is your way? THE way doesn't exist."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
~~ Bill Gates, in 1981

"Hopelessness springs eternal."
~~ Ben Greenman

"Work is much more fun than fun."
~~ Noël Coward [1899-1973]

"In The Field, there is no Soap Opera; Soap Opera occurs only In The Stands. And the same for Gossip."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"To be a writer one learns to live like one."
~~ Saul Bellow [1915-2005]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}