Quotes

Some quotes I like.

On attitude

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
--Mary Anne Evans

Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful, if it's bad, it's an experience.
--Victoria Holt

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
--T.S. Eliot

No matter how difficult the past, you can always begin again today.
--Jack Kornfield

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.
--W.M. Lewis

The wise man knows he doesn't know.
--Lao Tzu

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

On science

Eigentlich weiss man nur wenn man wenig weiss; mit dem Wissen wächst der Zweifel. (We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.)
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.
--Louis Pasteur

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
--Isaac Asimov

It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.
--Charles Sanders Peirce

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
--Albert Einstein

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
--Hans Hofmann

On forgiveness

I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes—it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘Well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self.
--Maya Angelou

On self-help

Heaven helps those who help themselves is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.
--Samuel Smiles

On creating a legacy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
--Leo Tolstoy

I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.
--Sheri S. Tepper

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
--Barack Obama

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.
--Charles de Montesquieu

Others

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
--Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.
--George Marshall

All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.
--Benjamin Disraeli

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.
--Khalil Gibran

The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.
--Tom Bodett

The obstacles to peace are not obstacles in matter, in inanimate nature, in the mountains which we pierce, in the seas across which we fly. The obstacles to peace are in the minds and hearts of men. In the study of matter we can be honest, impartial, true. That is why we succeed in dealing with it. But about the things we care for - which are ourselves, our desires and lusts, our patriotisms and hates - we find a harder test of thinking straight and truly. Yet there is the greater need. Only by intellectual rectitude and in that field shall we be saved. There is no refuge but in truth, in human intelligence, in the unconquerable mind of man.
--Norman Angell