Stephen

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

You can't deny laughter when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

There are three things men can do with women love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.

I am personally convinced that one person can be a change catalyst, a 'transformer' in any situation, any organization. Such an individual is yeast that can leaven an entire loaf. It requires vision, initiative, patience, respect, persistence, courage, and faith to be a transforming leader.

If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting.

Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.

Cats are notoriously sore losers. Coming in second best, especially to someone as poorly coordinated as a human being, grates their sensibility.

Honesty rare as a man without self-pity, kinders as large and plain as a prairie wind.

Life is not lost by dying life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.

A man said to the universe 'Sir, I exist' 'However,' replied the universe. 'The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.'

It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

Music is expression of harmony in sound. Love is the expression of harmony in life.

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the turtle standing on' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the little old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

My goal is simple. It is the complete understanding of the Universe.

God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them.

It matters if you just don't give up.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

The mayor gave no other answer than that deep guttural grunt which is technically known in municipal interviews as refusing to commit oneself.

Most people tire of a lecture in 10 minutes clever people can do it in 5. Sensible people never go to lectures at all.

Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it - and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape That's retirement.

It may be that those who do most, dream most.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say And why are you waiting

The good teacher ... discovers the natural gifts of his pupils and liberates them by the stimulating influence of the inspiration that he can impart. The true leader makes his followers twice the men they were before.

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.

The mission before us as ambassadors is to assure peace among, as it were, the diplomatic corps of fellow ambassadors. Thus we are to walk in lowliness (humility) and meekness, which foster longsuffering and enable us to forbear one another in love.

I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Vision looks inward and becomes duty.Vision looks outward and becomes aspiration.Vision looks upward and becomes faith.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits.

Lord Ronald said nothing he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.

I detest life-insurance agents they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.