Wise Words

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. ~Victor Hugo


We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. ~William James


You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him. ~Leo Aikman


Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. ~Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles


The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile. ~Plato


Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. ~Jonathan Kozel


Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. ~Frances Willard


Always when judging
Who people are,
Remember to footnote
The words "So far."
~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me. ~Author unknown, variation of an excerpt from "The Serenity Prayer" by Reinhold Neibuhr


A day is Eternity's seed, and we are its Gardeners. ~Erika Harris,empathicwriter.com


People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827


Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. ~W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938


The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself. ~Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament," Idylls of the King


I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes. ~Sara Teasdale, "The Philosopher"


If I had my life to live over, I'd have fewer meetings and more rendezvous. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it — torn up to irrecoverable tatters. ~Samuel Butler


Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. ~Theodore Roosevelt


Whatever we worship, short of God, is sure to be our undoing. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Toss your dashed hopes not into a trash bin but into a drawer where you are likely to rummage some bright morning. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982


Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself. ~Elbert Hubbard


On the bathing-tub of King T'ang the following words were engraved: "If you would one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation." ~Confucian Analects


The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. ~Jimmy Johnson


What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known. ~Samuel Johnson


To sensible men, every day is a day of reckoning. ~John W. Gardner


There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go. ~Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier)