Famous Quotes & Sayings

Martin Luther King, Jr.

When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Marguerite Yourcenar

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

Nicholas Johnson

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

R. Buckminster Fuller

However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.

Publilius Syrus

Wisdom had rather be buffeted than not listened to.

Publilius Syrus

Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.

Nelson Mandela

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

Nelson Mandela

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion.

Omar N. Bradley

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

Omar Sharif

He read his mind. He's a strange sort of man, isn't he? It's not just the advice and the wisdom that he has.

Oprah Winfrey

You have a gift that only you can give the world - that's the whole reason you're on the planet. Use your precious energy to build a magnificent life that really is attainable. The miracle of your existence calls for celebration every day.

Olivia Newton-John

My biggest mistake was my best lesson... you don't learn anything when everything is going perfectly.

Olivia Newton-John

I live my life in gratitude.

Oliver Goldsmith

Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, and fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.

Oliver Goldsmith

Who mix'd reason with pleasure, and wisdom with mirth: If he had any faults, he has left us in doubt.

Oliver Goldsmith

True wisdom consists of tracing effects to their causes.

Oliver Goldsmith

The wisdom of the ignorant somewhat resembles the instinct of animals; it is diffused in but a very narrow sphere, but within the circle it acts with vigor, uniformity, and success.

Marcus Terentius Varro

He who flees at the right time can fight again.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Wisdom is the only thing which can relieve us from the sway of the passions and the fear of danger, and which can teach us to bear the injuries of fortune itself with moderation, and which shows us all the ways which lead to tranquility and peace.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Freedom is participation in power.

Kenny Rogers

There is a trade off - as you grow older you gain wisdom but you lose spontaneity.

Kenny Smith

Instant enlightenment. A quintessential modernism, culture and religion accommodated to the age of fast food and bumper stickers. But psyche and spirit are not so exempt from the natural domain that they can simply produce self-change instantaneously, on demand. Wisdom precipitates through a notoriously slow apparatus of retorts and flasks, and it has to find receptive ground only in a properly seasoned mind.

Kenny Smith

People who turn to philosophy expecting to harvest a crop of formulas of wisdom or understanding do not understand-philosophy has such things, but they are merely incidental, not the essence of the matter. Philosophy is about subtilizing and tuning up the coherence and acuity of one's seeing, it is about opening new dimensions for insight, learning to think about what one is doing when one thinks instead of just blundering through the processes of putting thoughts together.

Mark Twain

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

Mark Twain

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose.

Mark Twain

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

Mark Twain

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Mark Twain

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Mark Twain

Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.