Philosophy

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: "I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God." "Don't you think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. "Yes," said Szilard. "He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts." – Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom.
"All of us are watchers – of television, of time clocks, or traffic on the freeway – but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing. – Peter Leschak.
"Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!" – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe." – Thomas Paine.
"There are two kinds of losers: (1) the good losers and (2) those who can't act." – Laurence Peter.
"There are three kinds of deceivers: fools, those who deceive themselves but not others; knaves, those who deceive others but not themselves, and philosophers, those who deceive both themselves and others." – Anonymous.
"Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything." – Sydney Smith.
"Any committee that is the slightest use is composed of people who are too busy to want to sit on it for a second longer than they have to." – Katharine Whitehorn.
"The committee divided between the theorists, who had done all their thinking long ago, or had it done for them, and the pragmatists, who hoped to discover what it was they thought in the process of saying it." – Ian McEwan.
"The seven social sins [are] politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice." – Mahandas Gandhi.
"A born leader of men is somebody who is afraid to go anywhere by himself." – Clifford Hanley.
"Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right. Both roles are crucial, but they differ profoundly. I often observe people in top positions doing the wrong things well." – Warren Bennis.
"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity." – Francis Parkman.
"Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power." – Michael Foot.
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim." – Gustave Le Bon.
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." – George Orwell.
"The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; it you can't top it, laugh at it; it you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved." – Russell Lynes.
"The contemplative life is often miserable. You should do more, think less and not watch yourself living." – Nicholas-Sebastien Chamfort.
"Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience." – Joyce Carol Oates.
"What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want." – Mignon McLaughlin.
"If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow creatures, let him begin with the long, solitary task of perfecting himself." – Robertson Davies.
"It is well to remeber that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." – John Andrew Holmes
"The fox know many tricks; the hedgehog one good one." – Anonymous.
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." – Anonymous.
"No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail." – Anonymous.
"The good man does not grieve that other people do not recognize his merits. His only anxiety is lest he should fail to recognize theirs." – Confucius.
"What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say." – Emerson.
"Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny." – A maxim.
"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." – Theodore Hesburgh.
"Behavior is congruent when what we are feeling on the inside matches what we are doing and saying on the outside. Behavior is consistent when it is in character and in alignment with personal and organizational values." – Kathy L. Indermill.
"Every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things have of course been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances." – Henry James.
"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new." – Ursula K. LeGuin
"There is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living." – David Starr Jordan.
"Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil – the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be." – William George Jordan.
"Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain. Two statements may be said concerning this individual. One is that he suffers from defects of spontaneity and individuality which may seem to be incurable. At the same time it may be said of him he does not differ essentially from the millions of the rest of us who walk upon this earth." – Erich Fromm.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." – Albert Einstein.
"We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." – T.S. Eliot.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." – Aristotle.
"No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal." – Marilyn Ferguson.
"That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods." – Thomas Paine.
"How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?" – Henry David Thoreau.
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." – Henry David Thoreau.
"No one can hurt you without your consent." – Eleanor Roosevelt.
"They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them." – Gandhi.
"Success is on the far side of failure." – IBM founder T.J. Watson.
"The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove." – Samuel Johnson.
"Lord, give me the courage to change the things which can and ought to be changed, the serenity to accept the things which cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference." – Alcoholics Anonymous prayer.
"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow: when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when shall all of us be Contemporaries, and make our appearance together." – Joseph Addison.
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." – Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth'." – Malcolm Muggeridge.
"Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible." – Victor Frankl.
"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least." – Goethe.
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of." – Pascal.
"Saint-Saëns knows everything. All he lacks is inexperience." – Berlioz speaking of his friend and French fellow music composer Saint-Saëns.
"You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take." – Wayne Gretzky.
"We are all angels with only one wing, we can only fly while embracing each other." – Luciano De Crescenzo.
"People with humility don't think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less." – Norman Vincent Peale.
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." – Lily Tomlin.
"If something goes wrong, it is my fault. If something turns out all right, we did it. If something turns out great, you did it." – Anonymous.
"Principles are deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, generic common denominators. They are tightly interwoven threads running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of life." – Stephen Covey.
"Our knowledge and understanding of correct principles is limited by our own lack of awareness of our true nature and the world around us and by the flood of trendy philosophies and theories that are not in harmony with correct principles. These ideas will have their season of acceptance, but, like many before them, they won't endure because they're built on false foundations. We are limited, but we can push back the borders of our limitations. An understanding of the principle of our own growth enables us to search out correct principles with the confidence that the more we learn, the more clearly we can focus the lens through which we see the world. The principles don't change; our understanding of them does." – Stephen Covey.
"Management, remember, is clearly different from leadership. Leadership is primarily a high-powered, right brain activity. It's more of an art; it's based on a philosophy. You have to ask the ultimate questions of life when you're dealing with personal leadership issues. … Management is the breaking down, the analysis, the sequencing, the specific application, the time-bound left-brain aspect of effective self-government. My own maxim of personal effectiveness is this: Manage from the left; lead from the right." – Stephen Covey.
"It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the freedom to handle difficult circumstances in the future and to inspire others to do so as well." – Stephen Covey.
"Anytime we think the problem is "out there," that thought is the problem. We empower what's out there to control us. The change paradigm is "outside-in" - what's out there has to change before we can change. The proactive approach is to change from the inside-out: to be different, and by being different, to effect positive change in what's out there - I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be more creative, I can be more cooperative." – Stephen Covey.
"It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise - and keep it. Or we can set a goal - and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honour becomes greater than our moods." – Stephen Covey.
"Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It's not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing. If you start to think the problem is "out there", stop yourself. That thought is the problem." – Stephen Covey.
"When you begin with the end in mind, you gain a different perspective. One man asked another on the death of a mutual friend, 'How much did he leave?' His friend responded, 'He left it all.'" – Stephen Covey.
"Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?" – Stephen Covey.
"Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, 'like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.' No management success can compensate for failure in leadership. But leadership is hard because we're often caught in a management paradigm." – Stephen Covey.
"People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value." – Stephen Covey.
"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state." – William James.
"The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities. We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we don't want a world of engineers." – Winston Churchill (1950).
"Reality is what I see, not what you see." – Anthony Burgess.
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us." – Jane Austen.
"Civilization is impossible without traditions, and progress impossible without the destruction of those traditions. The difficulty, and it is an immense difficulty, is to find a proper equilibrium between stability and variability." – Gustave Le Bon (1895).

"What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want." – Mignon McLaughlin.

Philosophy