Unsorted Quotes, Devotional Bits, "Good 'uns," and Beloved Bible Passages

Never ruin an apology with an excuse. (Kimberly Johnson)

Never tell evil of a man, if you do not know it for certainty, and if you know it for a certainty, then ask yourself, 'Why should I tell it?' (Johann K. Lavater)

No great deed, private or public, had ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty. (Leon Wieseltier)

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not. (Samuel Johnson)

Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision. (Hsi-Tang)

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket! (Will Rogers)

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. (E.W. Howe)

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. (Crowfoot)

Showing people that you sincerely care about them can often be as easy as listening to them. (Brian Koslow)

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work. (Mark Twain)

A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time — pills or stairs. (Joan Welsh)

Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies. (Ken Wilbur)

Cultivate a healthy cynicism and you will have no trouble distinguishing the weeds from the vegetables in your garden, and your yield will be plenty. (Jozef Wroblewski)

We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present. (Screwtape Letters)

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try. (Peggy Noonan)

Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future one. (Seneca)

I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me. (William Blake)

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. (CS Lewis)

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. (Gregg Easterbrook)

With enough 'ifs' we could put Paris in a bottle. (French saying)

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. (John Muir)

Warning: Humor may be hazardous to your illness. (Ellie Katz)

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. (African Proverb)

The only way I think I could thank God is by doing kind things to the people who need me now for I understand what it means to be desparate and lonely. (Magnolia Pitiquen)

I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately triumph than to triumph in a cause that will ultimately fail. (Woodrow Wilson)

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. (Umberto Eco)

Endeavor to be always patient of the faults and imperfections of others for thou has many faults and imperfections of thine own that require forbearance. If thou are not able to make thyself that which thou wishest, how canst thou expect to mold another in conformity to thy will? (Thomas a Kempis)

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. (Thomas á Kempis)

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. (Don Wilder and Bill Rechin)

Life doesn't happen to us, it happens from us. (Mike Wickett)

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. (Christopher Morley)

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. (William James)

He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit. (Sir Walter Scott)

When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made. (Anonymous)

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. (Michelangelo)

You unlock the door with the key of imagination... (Rod Serling

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. (Francis Bacon)

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. (Paulo Freire)

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. (William Arthur Ward)

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving. (H.U. Westermayer)

. . . making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. (Stephen Covey)

Health is not simply the absence of sickness. (Hannah Green)

If you treat people right they will treat you right — ninety percent of the time. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke. (Brendan Francis)

Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. (J.C. Watts)

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. (Spanish proverb)

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. (Marcus T. Cicero)

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time. (Marion Wright Edelman)

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. (James D. Miles)

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. (Carl Jung)

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation. (Jacques Barzun)

The best armor is to keep out of range. (Italian Proverb)

Government is, abstractedly taken, an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. (Jefferson, 1796)

Just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do. (Anonymous)

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. (George Santayana)

A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world. (Dorothy L. Sayers)

The world of dogmatic Christianity is a place in which thousands of people of quite different types keep on saying the same thing, and the world of 'broad-mindedness' and watered down 'religion' is a world where a small number of people (all of the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes. We shall never get re-union with them. (CS Lewis)

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. (Chinese Proverb)

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. (W. W. Ziege)

Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same. (Francesca Reigler)

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. (Malcolm X)

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure. (John D. Rockefeller)

When someone sings his own praises, he always gets the tune too high. (Mary H. Waldrip)

The man who thinks he can live without others is mistaken; the one who thinks others can't live without him is even more deluded. (Hasidic saying)

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. (Robert Frost)

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically — to say "no" to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger "yes" burning inside. (Stephen Covey)

Probably the most honest 'self-made man' ever was the one we heard say: 'I got to the top the hard way — fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.' (James Thom)

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. (Ellen Parr)

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. (Japanese Proverb)

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself. (Jane Addams)

If you see a whole thing — it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. (Ursula Le Guin)

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. (Henry David Thoreau)

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

[In regard to the varying effectiveness of different kinds of placebos], capsules containing colored beads are more effective than colored tablets, which are superior to white tablets with corners, which are better than round white tablets. Beyond this, intramuscular saline injections are superior to any tablet but inferior to intravenous injections. Tablets taken from a bottle labeled with a well-known brand name are superior to the same tablets taken from a bottle with a typed label. My favorite is a doctor who always handled placebo tablets with forceps, assuring the patient that they were too powerful to be touched by hand. (Max Velmans)

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrow's. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars? (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do. (Nan Fairbrother)

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. (Cleveland Amory)

The cat seldom interferes with other people's rights. His intelligence keeps him from doing many of the fool things that complicate life. (Carl Van Vechten)

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. (Albert Schweitzer)

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Isaac Newton)

The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.... It is the the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason. (Blaise Pascal)

Forgiveness is the economy of the heart..... Forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits. (Hannah More)

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly—but then perhaps also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree (Miguel de Unamuno)

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. (Viktor Frankl)

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. (Joan Didion)

You read about all these Terrorists—most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years. Now, compare that to Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and those people are all over you. Let's put Blockbuster in charge of immigration. (Anonymous)

Don't confuse being 'soft' with seeing the other guy's point of view. (George Bush)

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of greatest complexity; can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. (Tolstoy)

Everything is always okay in the end, if it's not okay, then it's not the end. (Anonymous)

We're a sentimental people. We like a few kind words better than millions of dollars given in a humiliating way. (Gamal Abdel Nasser)

To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others. (Anne-Sophie Swetchine)

Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. (Calvin Coolidge)

Rumor travels faster, but it don't stay put as long as truth. (Will Rogers)

How, then, it may be asked, can we ... avoid [God]? ...in our own time and place it is extremely easy. Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. (CS Lewis)

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. (Mahatma Gandhi)

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. (Evelyn Underhill)

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell. (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

If there was strife and contention in the home, very little else in life could compensate for it. (Lawana Blackwell)

In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath. (Kahlil Gibran)

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. (Marcus Aurelius)

Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices...Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends (CS Lewis)

Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, man is not aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental processes as being of the same sort as the genius of Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal. (RA Heinlein)

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. (Henry Ford)

Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. (Henry L. Doherty)

Easy reading is damned hard writing. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more; and all good things are yours. (Swedish Proverb)

You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. (A.K. Ramanujan)

To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart — and to keep them in parallel vigor one must exercise, study and love. (Karl von Bonstetten)

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough. (Frank Crane)

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. (Benjamin Franklin)

Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. (Spanish Proverb)

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. (Harry Truman)

Character is what you are in the dark. (Dwight L.Moody)

[We] have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion... Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (John Adams)

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size. (Mark Twain)

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken. (Orson Card)

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile. (Plato)

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. (Abraham Lincoln)

Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience? (Thomas J. Watson)

We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are. (Anaïs Nin)

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. (A.A. Milne)

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
     I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness? We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as a way in which they should break, so be it. (CS Lewis)

The day that microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they make vaccum cleaners. (Curry Muncher)

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching. (Satchel Paige)

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)

Experiences are the spectacles of intellect. (Arab proverb)

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind. (Albert Schweitzer)

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian. (Dennis Wholey)

If you know you're going to look back on today and laugh, you might as well start laughing now. (Anon)

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better." (John Brunner)

I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note — torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one. (Henry Ward Beecher)

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. (Mark Twain)

I know why dog is god spelled backward. They love with every ounce of their being. (Carolyn Shafer)

I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those prayers down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives. (Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College)

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly. (Francis Bacon)

Our only security is our ability to change. (John Lilly)

No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Get what you can and keep what you have; that's the way to get rich. (Scottish proverb)

If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their ministers had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven with their humble, fervent, and incessant prayers for them, they would have been much more in the way of success. (Jonathan Edwards)