I Shoot People

Wise people, though all laws were abolished, would lead the same life. — Aristophanes

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom: The first helps you make a living; the second helps you make a life. — Sandra Carny

Chance favors the prepared mind. — Louis Pasteur

Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart.

Judge each day, not by the harvest, but by the seeds you plant.

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake. — Sir Francis Bacon

If you have two pennies, spend one on bread to give you life, and one on a flower to give meaning to your life. — Ancient Chinese Proverb

Hospitality meets its greatest test when a new idea drops by uninvited.

The man who trusts men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them. — Cavour

If a wise man contendeth with a foolish man, whether he rage or laugh, there is no rest. — Proverbs, 29:9

A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows. — St. Francis of Assisi

Providing for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life. — Woodrow Wilson

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. — Harold Whitman

He who marries the Sprit of the Age will be a widower in the age to come.

Action without study is fatal. Study without action is futile. — Mary Beard

No one grows old by living — only by losing interest in living. — Marie Beynon Ray

Simplicity doesn’t mean to live in misery and poverty. You have what you need, and you don’t want to have what you don’t need. — Charan Singh

The three grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for. — Alexander Chalmers

Circus performers know that they can break their necks falling into a net; it is the uncertainty which keeps them skillful and careful. They know also that the net can save their lives; it is this confidence which makes them daring. — S. Helen Kelley

Who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks. — Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Happiness is a journey, not a destination. So …
Work like you don’t need the money,
love like you’ve never been hurt,
and dance like no one is watching.

“Make lots of money”, “enjoy the work”, “operate within the law”: choose 2. — Brian Anderson

Edmund Burke

• There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
• All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
• He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

Courage

• The ultimate goodness is not to be afraid. — Nietzsche
• The root of beauty is courage. — Pasternak
• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. — C.S. Lewis
• Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning. — Sir Winston Churchill
• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. — Mark Twain
• Have courage for the greatest sorrow of life, and patience for the small one; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. — Victor Hugo

Character

• The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do. — John Holt
• Reputation is what you are in the light; Character is what you are in the dark.
• 1. Do not be deluded. 2. If you can’t help being deluded, do not judge others, and do not feel guilty. 3. If you can’t help being deluded, and you can’t help judging or feeling guilt, do not open your mouth. — Engaku Sutra
• A man’s treatment of money is the most decisive test of his character – how he makes it and how he spends it.” — James Moffatt
• Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of life. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Benjamin Franklin

Mostly from Poor Richard’s Almanack

• No nation was ever ruined by trade.
• A little house well filled, a little field well tilled, and a little wife well willed, are great riches. February 1735
• Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. June 1735
• Work as if you were to live a hundred years.
  Pray as if you were to die tomorrow. May 1757
• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Bertrand Russell

• Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
• It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
• Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
• Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
• Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
• Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.

Voltaire

• The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.
• A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.
• The biggest reward for a thing well done is to have done it.
• Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
• I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.

Joseph Addison

• Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
• Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
• Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.

Jonathan Swift

• Of so little weight are the greatest Services to Princes, when put into the Ballance with a refusal to gratify their Passions.
• Care and Vigilance, with a very common Understanding, may preserve a Man’s Goods from Thieves, but Honesty has no fence against superior Cunning.
• Providence never intended to make the Management of publick Affairs a Mystery, to be comprehended only by a few Persons of sublime Genius, of which there seldom are three born in an Age.
• Among People of Quality a Wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable Companion, because she cannot always be young.
• … having in my Life perused many State-Trials, which I ever observed to terminate as the Judges thought fit to direct …
• Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
• Men are never so Serious, Thoughtful, and Intent, as when they are at Stool.
• Here I discovered the secret Causes of many great Events that have surprized the World, how a Whore can Govern the Back-stairs, the Back-stairs a Council, and the Council a Senate.

Mark Twain

• “When I was ten, I thought my parents knew everything. When I became twenty, I was convinced they knew nothing. Then, at thirty, I realized I was right when I was ten.”
• Widely credited to Mark Twain. Herewith are some of his others.
• “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”
• “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
• “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.”
• “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
• “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. “

More Twain here

Longer Quotations

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, — often the surfeit of our own behavior, — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail; and my nativity was under Ursa major; so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. King Lear, Act I, Scene ii.

I would recommend to everyone that admirable precept which Pythagoras is said to have given to his disciples: “Pitch upon that course of life which is the most excellent, and custom will render it the most delightful.” Men whose circumstances will permit tham to choose their own way of life are inexcusable if they do not pursue that which their judgment tells them is the most laudable. The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination, since, by the rule above mentioned, inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination. Joseph Addison