James

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results.

You are today where your thoughts have brought you you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs.

We do not attract what we want, But what we are.

Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bear bad fruit.

To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him.

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

One's religion is whatever one is most interested in.

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.

To die will be an awfully big adventure.

We are all failures--at least, the best of us are.

Always be a little kinder than necessary.

Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow.

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

Wealth may be an ancient thing, for it means power, it means leisure, it means liberty.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.'

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

But all God's angels come to us disguised...

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.

As life runs on, the road grows strange With faces new,-and near the end The milestones into headstones change, 'Neath every one a friend.

The fearless are merely fearless. People who act in spite of their fear are truly brave.

For target shooting, that's okay. Get a license and go to the range. For defense of the home, that's why we have police departments.

It is not a loss of freedom. It's a measure to protect it. on gun control

The politicians don't just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life IS worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.

In every child who is born, no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility toward human life toward the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of terror, and of God.

The true recipe for a miserable existence is to quarrel with Providence.

More important than learning how to recall things is finding ways to forget things that are cluttering the mind.

I believe it is the nature of people to be heroes, given the chance.

Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words discipline, love, luck -- but, most of all, endurance.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didnt have it and thought of other things if you did.

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way ... people look at reality, then you can change it.

The price we pay when pursuing any art or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

To defend one's self against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it fears must be faced.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need a sense of life's possibilities.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

The price one pays for pursuing a profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

I have found you an argument I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one -- neglect.

No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself and what he possesses else he lives precariously, and at discretion.

Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

You can't divorce religious belief and public service ... I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense ... human rights invented America.

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.

An act of terrorism totally outside the bounds of international law and diplomatic tradition. ... a crisis that calls for firmness and restraint.

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

I personally think that he did violate the law, that he committed impeachable offenses. But I don't think that he thinks he did.

You have given me a great responsibility to stay close to you, to be worthy of you and to exemplify what you are.

One of the most basic principles for making and keeping peace within and between nations. . . is that in political, military, moral, and spiritual confrontations, there should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.

You become a champion by fighting one more round. When things are tough, you fight one more round.

Be virtuous and you'll be happy Nonsense Be happy and you'll begin to be virtuous.

Intelligence is when you spot a flaw in your boss's reasoning. Wisdom is when you refrain from pointing it out.

Better and ugly face than an ugly mind.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

If wrinkles must be written upon your brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

Next in importance to Freedom and Justice is popular education, without which neither Freedom nor Justice can be permanently maintained.

Ideas control the world.

To forgive is human, to forget divine. . ..

Telling the truth will lead you to freedom telling the lies will lead you to slavery.

Jingshen is the Mandarin word for spirit and vivacity. It is an important word for those who would lead, because above all things, spirit and vivacity set effective organizations apart from those that will decline and die.

Be yourself. No one can ever tell you you're doing it wrong.

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors - they terrify me. Scientists are no problem against them I feel quite confident.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Respect a man, he will do the more.

The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's mortality.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

A ragged colt may prove a good horse. And so may an untoward slovenly boy prove a decent and useful man.

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.

Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their natural and surest support.

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to Farce, or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

It's not the rules and regulations you follow carefully that will win you favor with God but rather offering your life to Him in complete faith that His Son, Jesus Christ, conquered sin and death on your behalf and for your salvation.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

Freedom is being able to live with the consequences of your decisions.

The world is blessed most by men who do things, not by those who merely talk about them.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.

I will have no man work for me who has not the capacity to become a partner.

The acquisition of knowledge is the mission of research, the transmission of knowledge is the mission of teaching and the application of knowledge is the mission of public service.

Remember that life is not measured in hours but in accomplishments.

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

People who are smart get into Mensa. People who are really smart look around and leave.

This was a great year for preventive worrying. Seldom in recent history have so many people worried about so many things that didn't happen in the end.

Half circus and half Supreme Court.

How Kennedy knew the precise drop in milk consumption in 1960, the percentage rise in textile imports from 1957 to 1960 and the number of speeches cleared by the Defense Department is not quite clear, but anyway, he did. He either overwhelmed you with decimal points or disarmed you with a smile and a wisecrack.

An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.

The most essential factor is persistence - the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency thoughtlessness, and optimism.

Be not surprised if thou findest thyself in possession of unexpected wealth. Allah will provide an unexpected use for it.

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

I would advise you to keep your overhead down avoid a major drug habit play every day and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it, and you need them to hear it.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

All men should strive to learn before they die What they are running from, and to, and why.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs.... He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo the splendor of fame fades into nothing but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the ameteur for three, or the cry of the critc for five. (from Whistler vs. Ruskin, 1878)

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say, you do not like it and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

You are today where your thoughts have brought you you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

Boredom is a sign of satisfied ignorance, blunted apprehension, crass sympathies, dull understanding, feeble powers of attention, and irreclaimable weakness of character.

A politician thinks of the next election a statesman of the next generation.

The postman always rings twice.

We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of thingsbut there are times when we stop. We sit sill. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself one.

Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes.

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning its two eyes are geography and chronology.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some people are ready to change and others are not.

Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does.

Toward no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

I want to believe in intelligent design, and hence I am suspicious of anything that seems to confirm my desire to believe.

Ill feel that horrible feeling in my stomach you get when youve gone over to the Dark Side. But Ill be fine. Thats the good thing about the Dark Side. Eventually, your eyes adjust.

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

Exercise alone provides psychological and physical benefits. However, if you also adopt a strategy that engages your mind while you exercise, you can get a whole host of psychological benefits fairly quickly.

This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim.

Absence, with all its pains, is, by this charming moment, wiped away.

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people--that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.

The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself.

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.