ABILITY:
"No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor."
-Andrew Carnegie
"Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short."
-Nicholas of Cusa
"Skill to do comes of doing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability."
-Elbert Green Hubbard
"Better be proficient in one art than a smatterer in a hundred."
-Japanese Proverb
"They are able because they think they are able."
-Vergil
ABSENCE:
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Isle of beauty, fare thee well!"
-Thomas Haynes Bayly
"Our hours in love have wings; in absence crutches."
-Colley Cibber
"Absence from whom we love is worse than death And frustrate hope severer than despair."
-William Cowper
"Out of sight out of mind."
-Homer
"Absence lessens weak and increases violent passions, as wind extinguishes tapers and lights up a fire."
-Duc Francois de La Rochefoucauld
"Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide in this dull world, which in thy absence is no better than a sty?"
-Shakespeare
"The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent from one another."
-Genesis 31:49
ACTION:
"I am perplexed... whether to act or not act."
-Aeschylus
"Deliberate with caution, but act with decision; and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness."
-Charles Caleb Colton
"A man's action is only a picture book of his creed."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Brave actions never want a Trumpet."
-Thomas Fuller
"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in the direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, --but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Actions speak louder than words."
-Proverb
"With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."
-John F. Kennedy
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and...those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
-Robert F. Kennedy
"We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them."
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld
"We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out."
-Theodore Roosevelt
"Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing."
-Shakespeare
"Heaven n'er helps the men who will not act."
-Sophocles
"A rolling stone can gather no moss."
-Publilius Syrus
ADVERSITY:
"The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude..."
-Francis Bacon
"Hope and patience are two sovereign remedies for all, the surest reposals, the softest cushions to lean on in adversity."
-Robert Burton
"Adversity is the first path to truth."
-George Gordon, Lord Byron
"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant."
-Horace
"The flower that follows the sun does so even in cloudy days."
-Robert Leighton
"Who hath not known ill fortune, never knew himself, or his own virtue."
-David Mallet
"In adversity man is saved by hope."
-Menander
"Trial is the true test of mortal men."
-Pindar
"Of one ill comes many."
-Scottish Proverb
"Great men rejoice in adversity just as brave soldiers triumph in war."
-Seneca
"The worst is not
So long as we can say, "This is the worst."
-Shakespeare
"A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity."
-Proverbs 17:17
ADVICE:
"Many receive advice, only the wise profit by it."
-Publilius Syrus
"The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself."
-Oscar Wilde
AGE:
"We hope to grow old, and we fear old age:
that is to say, we love life and flee death."
-Jean de la Bruyere
"Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members."
-Pearl S. Buck
"Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools."
-George Chapman
"Age is like love; it cannot be hid."
-Thomas Dekker
"Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old age a regret."
-Benjamin Disraeli
"A woman is as old as she looks to a man that likes to look at her."
-Finey Peter Dunne
"Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so."
-Tryon Edwards
"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age."
-Victor Hugo
"It was near a miracle to see an old man silent, since talking is the disease of age."
-Ben Jonson
"Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form."
-Andre Maurois
"He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of Age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden."
-Plato
"Before old age my care was to live well; in old age, to die well."
-Seneca
"Nobody loves life like an old man."
-Sophocles
"No wise man ever wished to be younger."
-Jonathan Swift
AMBITION:
"It is attempting to reach the top at a single leap, that so much misery is caused in the world."
-William Cobbett
"Every eel hopes to become a whale."
-German Proverb
"The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream."
-Shakespeare
ANGER:
"I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow."
-William Blake
"Violence in the voice is often only the death rattle of reason in the throat."
-John Frederick Boyes
"Anger and folly walk cheek by jowl;
repentance treads on both their heels."
-Benjamin Franklin
"Two things a man should never be angry at: What he can help, and what he cannot help."
-Thomas Fuller
"Let anger's fire be slow to burn."
-George Herbert
"The best answer to anger is silence."
-German Proverb
"When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart."
-Martin Luther
"A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger."
-Proverbs 15:1
"He best keeps from anger who remembers God is always looking upon him."
-Plato
ART:
"It is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth...."
-Robert Browning
"In life beauty perishes, but not in art."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
"Art is the stored honey of the human soul gathered on wings of misery and travail."
-Theodore Dreiser
"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed."
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity."
-Henry James
AUTUMN:
"Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay."
-Robert Browning
AVARICE:
"The lust of avarice has so totally siezed upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them, than they to possess their wealth."
-Pliny the Elder
BEAUTY:
"Beauty and wisdom are seldom found together."
-Petronius Arbiter
"Beauty is the gift of God."
-Aristotle
"Beauty is on the eye of the beholder."
-Margaret W. Hungerford
BELIEF:
"Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for--because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything."
-Peter Marshall:
"What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us--what convictions, what courage, what faith-- win or lose."
Adlai E. Stevenson
BETRAYAL:
"On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger had struck it into the back of its neighbor."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
BLOOD:
"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
-Winston Churchill
BOOKS:
"That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit."
-Amos Bronson Alcott
"Some books are to be tasted; others swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested."
-Francis Bacon
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
-Mark Twain
"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
-Clarence S. Day
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
-Charles W. Eliot
CHANGE:
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
-Robert F. Kennedy
"It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going."
-Groucho Marx
"He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human instiution which rejects progress is the cemetery."
-Harold Wilson
CHARACTER:
"A man's character is the reality of himself. His reputation is the opinion others have formed of him. Character is in him; reputation is from other people---that is the substance, this is the shadow."
-Henry Ward Beech
"Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All sunshine makes a desert"
-Arab Proverb
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
-Aristotle
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
