Quotes by Writers - Page 30

The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties.
Abigail Adams
It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. ... Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams
Times of general calamity and confusion have ever been productive of the greatest minds. The purist ore is produced from the hottest furnace and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storms.
Charles Caleb Colton
If you suffer thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
Elbert Hubbard
Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.
Frank Harris
(Adversity is) the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself being especially free from admirers then.
Samuel Johnson
Do not show your wounded finger for everything will knock up against it.
Baltasar Gracián
We always love those who admire us and we do not always love those whom we admire.
La Rochefoucauld
There are three modes of bearing the ills of life: by indifference by philosophy and by religion.
Charles Caleb Colton
Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
Denis Diderot
God alone can finish.
John Ruskin
Let each look to himself and see what God wants of him and attend to this leaving all else alone.
Henry Suso
It had been my repeated experience that when you said to life calmly and firmly (but very firmly!) "I trust you do what you must " life had an uncanny way of responding to your need.
Olga Ilyin
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it could have let yourself go and dug harder.
Emily Carr
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
Baltasar Gracián
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give. For we that live to please must please to live.
Samuel Johnson
Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.
Charles de Gaulle
The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.
Kenneth Tynan
By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
Peter Ustinov
In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.
Rex Reed
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.
Joseph Wood Krutch
With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.
George Burns
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
Orson Welles
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Kenneth Tynan
Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.
Voltaire
Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Lin Yutang
If you are wise live as you can if you cannot live as you would.
Baltasar Gracián
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Olive Schreiner
Happiness ... can exist only in acceptance.
Denis de Rougemont
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence to be always calm ... to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
Cyril Connolly
Adapt or perish now as ever is nature's inexorable imperative.
H.G.Wells
A hero is a man who does what he can.
Romain Rolland
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Alan Watts
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambitions.
Vauvenargues
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
Jean Nicholas Grou
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight and with which he did not always willingly cooperate and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
Samuel Johnson
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang-tzu
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Okakura Kakuzo
A wise man never refuses anything to necessity.
Publilius Syrus
God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas but for scars.
Elbert Hubbard
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
La Rochefoucauld
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Goethe
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
La Rochefoucauld
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can do.
Lin Yutang
To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.
Vauvenargues
In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.
John Adams
The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves.
Elaine Morgan
The best is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
And so the very thing that should make Egypt strong - the richness and diversity of her culture - serves to divide her and make her weak.
Ahdaf Soueif
He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.
Owen Hatherley
When you want to be well-liked in the world, you have to let a lot of people teach you things that you know and they don't.
Nicolas Chamfort
Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau- and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.
H.G.Wells
Thus it is that no cruelty whatsoever passes by without impact. Thus it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America’s Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.
Armando Valladares
One of the major obstacles impeding any positive future change in our lives is that we are too busy with our current work or activity. Levi quit his tax-work, Peter stopped fishing at lake, Paul ceased being a priest. They all left their jobs because they thought it was necessary.
John Ruskin