Balance

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
- Carl Gustav Jung, 1875 - 1961

Breaks balance out. The sun don't shine on the same old dog's rear end every day.
- Darrell Royal

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves.
- Hubert H. Humphrey, 1911 - 1978

I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. But in the long run my books balance pretty well.
- Kate Seredy, 1899 - 1975

Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.
- Peter Ustinov, 1921 - 2004

The politician is an acrobat; he keeps his balance by doing the opposite of what he says.
- Maurice Barrès, 1862 - 1923

H. G. Wells

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Advertising is legalized lying.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Our true nationality is mankind.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

- All from Herbert George Wells, 1866 - 1946

About:

Herbert George Wells was born at Bromley, England on 21 Sep 1866. He was apprenticed as a draper, which inspired several of his novels, then taught school before securing a scholarship to the Normal School of Science at South Kensington. Although his writing covers a broad range, he is now best known for his science fiction work, mostly between 1895 and 1905, starting with The Time Machine and including The War of the Worlds.

Pirates

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
- Henry Lewis Mencken, 1880 - 1956

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.
- Bern Williams

Even pirates, before they attack another ship, hoist a black flag.
- Bela Kiraly

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
- James Russell Lowell, 1819 - 1891

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Pain

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before. To test your limits. To break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anaïs Nin, 1903 - 1977

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
- Anne Sullivan

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
- Clive Staples Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
- M. Kathleen Casey

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
- Kahlil Gibran, 1883 - 1931

I'm not into working out. My philosophy: No pain, no pain.
- Carol Leifer

Wine

Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart.
- Aeschylus, 525 - 456 BC

There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.
- Baron Rothschild

I will not be as those who spend the day in complaining of headache, and the night in drinking the wine that gives it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749 - 1832

Come, for the House of Hope is built on sand: bring wine, for the fabric of life is as weak as the wind.
- Wilfred Wilson Gibson

Men are like wine; some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.
- Pope John XXIII, 1881-1963

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.
- Clifton Fadiman, 1904 - 1999

James Fenimore Cooper

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.

Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter.

The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

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 minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.

...no civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.

Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
- All from James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851

About:
James Cooper was born at Burlington, New Jersey on 15 Sep in 1789. His father was an ambitious judge who made a fortune in land development, and married another fortune. William Cooper packed up his family to move to his new project, Cooperstown, New York. James was sent to Yale at age thirteen, where he was expelled for his pranks in his junior year. He went to sea, first as a merchant seaman, then in the Navy. On his father's death, his newfound financial independence allowed him to leave the Navy and take up the life of the gentleman farmer. Disgusted with the book he was reading, he told his wife he could write better. She suggested he prove it, and though his first book was a failure, he became America's first novelist. He added Fenimore, his mother's maiden name, to his in 1826, the same year Last of the Mohicans was released.

Alone

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
- Alan Ashley-Pitt

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.
- Alfred Victor Vigny, 1797 - 1863

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
- Arthur C. Clarke

People who take time to be alone usually have depth, originality, and quiet reserve.
- John Miller

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels fastest who travels alone.
- Joseph Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.
- Jules Renard, 1864 - 1910

Impossible

Attempt the impossible in order to improve you work.
- Bette Davis, 1908 - 1989

The Wright brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.
- Charles F. Kettering, 1876 - 1958

Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.
- Doug Larson

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
- Douglas Noel Adams, 1952 - 2001

When [a politician] is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it. In short, when he is impotent he proves to us that the thing is easy; and when he is omnipotent he proves that it is impossible.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874 - 1936

It is not a lucky word, this "impossible"; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouth.
- Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
- Aristotle

All things are possible until they are proved impossible. And even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
- Pearl S. Buck

Faith sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.
- Anonymous

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
- Oscar Wilde

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
- Louis D. Brandeis

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
- Douglas Adams

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
- Clarke's Second Law

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
- Pearl S. Buck

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
- Theodore Roethke

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Clarke's First Law

Who so loves believes the impossible.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Attack

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
- Burrhus Frederick Skinner, 1904 - 1990

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends.
- Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1709 - 1784

Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb.
- William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811 - 1863

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
- Gustave Flaubert, 1821 - 1880

The best form of defense is attack.
- Karl von Clausewitz, 1780 - 1831

“The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”
- Winston Churchill

“Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the Attack.”
- Sun Tzu

“Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli

Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly.
- Virgil

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
- Karl Kraus

Richelieu

War is one of the scourges with which it has pleased God to afflict men.

To know how to dissimulate is the knowledge of kings.

Harshness towards individuals who flout the laws and commands of the state is for the public good; no greater crime against the public interest is possible than to show leniency to those who violate it.

Reason must be the universal rule and guide; all things must be done according to reason without allowing oneself to be swayed by emotion.

If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
- All from Armand Jean du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, 1585 - 1642

Manipulation

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. In everything man has accomplished, we have only manipulated nature into doing what it is.
- Francis Bacon, 1561 - 1626

...nobody has the right to manipulate anybody or to impress anybody with his stronger personality, not even for the other's imagined good, for nobody can know what that good is. This is courtesy rather than callousness, for the other's dignity is thus acknowledged, or the dignity of his grief is respected.
- Imgard Schloegl

When you learn to trust your emotions instead of manipulating them, you will experience true love.
- Lucy Alexis Smith

Successful ... politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.
- Walter J. Lippmann, 1889 - 1974

Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.
- William Arthur Ward, 1921 - 1994

Labor

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955

Congenial labor is the secret of happiness.
- Arthur C. Benson

It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
- John Ruskin, 1819 - 1900

Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.
- Mary Ellen Chase

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
- Ulysses S. Grant, 1822 - 1885

He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
- Francis of Assisi, 1182 - 1226

Education from the Top

At college age, you can tell who is best at taking tests and going to school, but you can't tell who the best people are. That worries the hell out of me.
- Barnaby C. Keeney, Brown University

I find the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
- Clark Kerr, University of California at Berkeley

Much that passes for education ... is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.
- David Pierpont Gardner, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

I won't say there aren't any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know.
- Derek Bethune, Harvard University

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.
- Leon Botstein, Bard College

Anyone who refuses to speak out off campus does not deserve to be listened to on campus.
- Theodore M. Hesburgh, University of Notre Dame

Education Reconsidered

Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Kuwait.
- A. Whitney Brown

Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
- Irsin Edman

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue more clever than another.
- Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
- Paul Karl Feyerabend, 1924 - 1994

You have been told that Real Life is not like college, and you have been correctly informed. Real Life is more like high school.
- Meryl Streep