Right Attitudes

Time is short—your obligations are infinite.—Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?
—Jean Baptiste Massillon (French Bishop)

Never trust a man who speaks well of everybody.
—John Churton Collins (British Literary Critic)

Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.
—Arabic Proverb

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.
—Joseph Conrad (Polish-born British Novelist)

There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.
—Denis Waitley (American Motivational Speaker)

There is a canyon of difference between doing your best to glorify God and doing whatever it takes to glorify yourself. The quest for excellence is a mark of maturity. The quest for power is childish.
—Max Lucado (American Author, Minister)

Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet.
—Chinese Proverb

Fear of failure must never be a reason not to try something.
—Frederick W. Smith (American Entrepreneur)

It is best to do things systematically, since we are only humans, and disorder is our worst enemy.
—Hesiod (Greek Poet)

That charity which longs to publish itself, ceases to be charity.
—Ulrich von Hutten (German Humanist, Reformer)

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
—E. L. Doctorow (American Novelist)

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.
—Leonard Woolf (British Political Theorist)

Nothing is as frustrating as arguing with someone who knows what he’s talking about.
—Sam Ewing (American Writer)

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?
—Dolores Huerta (American Labor Activist)

Too often, the opportunity knocks, but by the time you push back the chain, push back the bolt, unhook the two locks and shut off the burglar alarm, it’s too late.
—Rita Coolidge (American Singer, Songwriter)

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one’s insistence that he possesses it.
—Kenneth Bancroft Clark (American Psychologist)

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.
—Russell Conwell (American Baptist Minister)

You should bring something into the world that wasn’t in the world before. It doesn’t matter what that is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a table or a film or gardening—everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say ‘I did that.’
—Ricky Gervais (British Comedian, Writer)

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

We may draw good out of evil; we must not do evil, that good may come.
—Maria Weston Chapman (American Abolitionist)

The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.
—Richard Leider (American Executive Coach)

Time ripens all things; no man is born wise.
—Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish Novelist)