quotes by Professional Writer Quotes

“Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don't demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.”

“Strict punctuality is a cheap virtue.”

“We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.”

“Spend some time this weekend on home improvement; improve your attitude toward your family.”

“Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep-seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.”

“Proclaim not all though knowest, or all though owest.”

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural . . to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.”

“Display is as false as it is costly.”

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory”

“Don't overload Gratitude; if you do, she'll kick.”

“To all apparent beauties blind, each blemish strikes an envious mind.”

“Once bliss becomes normal it's no longer bliss, it's just peace.”

“Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax.”

“The valuable person in any business is the individual who can and will cooperate with others.”

“Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.”

“Vain is the hope of finding pleasure in that which one has hitherto disdained; as when the warrior hopes to find pleasure in the joys of the sedentaries.”

“The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.”

“If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“He that is rich need not live sparingly,and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.”

“He that hath a calling, hath an office of profit and honor.”

“Si quelqu'un veut un mouton, c'est la preuve qu'il en existe un. (If somebody wants a sheep, that is a proof that one exists.)”

“Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”

“Handle your tools without mittens.”

“Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself.”

“After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future. That's an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless.”

“For a decision-the freest of my actions just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me.”

“Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.”

“Trusting too much to others care is the ruin of many.”

“The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.”

“A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.”

“The moment you put a mental label on another human being, you can no longer truly relate to that person. . . It then becomes possible to perpetrate any act of violence.”

“One mend-fault is worth two find-faults, but one find-fault is better than two make-faults.”

“For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

“Let thy discontents be thy secrets; if the world knows them 'twill despise thee and increase them.”

“Love is not really blind- the bandage is never so tight but that it can peep.”

“I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.”

“No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.”

“In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two works, industry and frugality.”

“Transformational entertainment is a story that both entertains and uplifts you, not simply because you are inspired, but because it reveals the mechanics that allow people to have more effective, loving lives, lives of more connection, community, and communion.”

“As a career, the business of an orthodox preacher is about as successful as that of a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through hell.”

“If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.”

“Thou can'st not joke an enemy into a friend,but thou may'st a friend into an enemy.”

“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”

“Money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more.”

“Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.”

“...it is prodigious the quantity of good that may be done by one man if he will make a business of it.”

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”