Right Attitudes

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
—Louis Kronenberger (American Literary Critic)

Life—how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
—V. S. Pritchett (British Short Story Writer)

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
—Lois McMaster Bujold (American Writer)

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian Novelist)

Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body.
—Martin Luther (German Protestant Theologian)

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher, Mathematician)

I believe in grumbling; it is the politest form of fighting known.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

A botanist should be a man of a liberal and enlarged mind, who looks upon all the productions of nature with an eye of science, but with a heart of sensibility.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Only the brave know how to forgive… A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.
—Laurence Sterne (Irish Anglican Novelist)

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

Heaven will permit no man to secure happiness by crime.
—Vittorio Alfieri (Italian Poet, Dramatist)

While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.
—Sissela Bok (Swedish Philosopher)

When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbor’s garden?
—James Russell Lowell (American Poet, Critic)

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
—Woody Allen (American Film Actor, Director)

Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship, let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American Poet)

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit against one’s good nature.
—Montesquieu (French Political Philosopher)

Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.
—Edmund Burke (British Philosopher, Statesman)

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 (English Theatre Critic, Writer)

Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.
—Robert Ranke Graves (British Writer)

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (American Physicist)

Fame is the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.
—Don DeLillo (American Author)

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
—Simone Weil (French Philosopher, Political Activist)

Since I couldn’t actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.
—Sidney Poitier (American Actor, Film Director)

No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
—Robert Burton (English Scholar, Clergyman)

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.
—William Feather (American Author, Publisher)

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.
—Allen Klein (American Author)

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.
—George Goodman (American Economist)

What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
—William Carlos Williams (American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian)

Finding practical answers to tough problems seems to take a backseat to ideology.
—Christopher R. Hill (American Diplomat)

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.
—Catharine Beecher ((1800–78) American Educationalist, Reformer)

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you will have to win their hearts to have them work with you.
—William J. H. Boetcker (American Presbyterian Minister)

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
—Paul Valery (French Critic, Poet)

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster (English Novelist)

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.
—Byron Katie (American Speaker)

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
—Paul Auster (American Novelist, Poet)