Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success.

Henry David Thoreau

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Henry David Thoreau

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Henry David Thoreau

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Henry David Thoreau

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Henry David Thoreau

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

Henry David Thoreau

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Henry David Thoreau

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.

Henry David Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.

Mary Webb

If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path.

Mary Engelbreit

Life is too short to sleep it all away!

Mary Engelbreit

Life is too short to rush around and be too busy for your kids.

Patricia Briggs

Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death.

Pat Nixon

I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious to advance the political career of my husband.

Pat Metheny

The Unity Band project has been life-changing for me. I have led many groups of talented musicians, but this is unlike anything else.

Pat Riley

All of us have at least one great voice deep inside.

Pat Riley

Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.

Paddy Chayefsky

I don't know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about truth. I just want to know the momentary fact of things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual. It's sensual. It's alive!

Pablo Casals

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do.

Pablo Neruda

In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?

P. J. O'Rourke

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

Plautus

He who falls in love meets a worse fate than he who leaps from a rock.

Plautus

He that is in love, faith, if he be hungry, is not hungry at all.

Plautus

Love has both its gall and honey in abundance: it has sweetness to the taste, but it presents bitterness also to satiety.

Plautus

Find me a reasonable lover against his weight in gold.

Plautus

The day, water, sun, moon, night - I do not have to purchase these things with money.

Plato

To him who disgraces his family life is no life, and to such a person there is no one a friend, neither while living nor when dead.

Plato

Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods.

Plato

Access to power must be confined to those who are not in love with it.

Plato

Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.

Plato

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.