About Life

About life
Act in the valley so that you need not fear those who stand on the hill.
Danish proverb

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Sir James Dewar, Scientist (1877-1925)

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.
W. Edwards Deming

All my life I've wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific.
Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin (1939- )

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

We think in generalities, but we live in details.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgettable love.
Diego Marchi
________________________________________
About happiness
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)
________________________________________
About being oneself
If all pulled in one direction, the world would keel over.
Yiddish proverb

The man who never makes a mistake always takes orders from one who does.
No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
Daisy Bates (1863-1951)

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.
James R. Cook

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844-1924)
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
________________________________________
About the necessity of compromise
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.
Kathleen Norris
________________________________________
About standing up for one's opinion
One who sits between two chairs may easily fall down.
Proverb from Romania and Russia
The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.
________________________________________
About humbleness
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right.
© Ashleigh Brilliant

The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.
Harold Coffin

Too bad all the people who know how to run this country are busy running taxicabs or cutting hair.
George Burns (1896-1996)

The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him.
Stanislaw Jerszy Lec (1909- )

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
Olin Miller

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)
________________________________________
About tolerance
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.
Chinese proverb

I will not condemn you for what you did yesterday, if you do it right today.
Sheldon S. Maye
________________________________________
About hypocrisy
We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)

A memorandum isn't written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer.
Dean Acheson

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they don't want it.
A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhornne Clemens] (1835-1910)

A jury consists of twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost
________________________________________
About clearness
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
Chinese proverb

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Charles Mingus
________________________________________
About tact
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.
T. H. White
________________________________________
About chatterboxes
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819-1880)

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1775)
Of those who say nothing, few are silent.
Thomas Neill

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Plato (429-347 BC)

The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.
Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
________________________________________
About learning from history
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana (1863-1952)

I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones.
John Cage (1912-1992)

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
________________________________________
About exaggerated realism
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Jules de Gaultier
________________________________________
About change
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

The important thing is never to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
________________________________________
About leadership
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
W. A. Nance

Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
Ludwig Börne
________________________________________
Miscellaneous
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler (1612-1680)

You must believe in free will; there is no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

Useless laws weaken necessary laws.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1775)

The nice thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from.
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
C. Northcote Parkinson

Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
Elias Root Beadle

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
George Wallace

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
H. Jackson Brown

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney