Love

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists - Anita Brookner

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.... It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more - Erica Jong

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked - Erich Segal

Love never reasons, but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles then lest it has done too little - Hannah More

A life without love, without the presence of the beloved, is nothing but a mere magic-lantern show. We draw out slide after slide, swiftly tiring of each, and pushing it back to make haste for the next - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything - Katharine Hepburn

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing - Mignon McLaughlin

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 the same difference in a person before and after he is in love, as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning - Vincent van Gogh

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important - Lisa Hoffman

Leadership

Do not follow where the path may lead.Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail - Harold R. McAlindon (also attributed to Emerson and others)

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it - Dwight D. Eisenhower

There go the people.I must follow them for I am their leader - Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

What chance gathers she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A general is just as good or just as bad as the troops under his command make him - General Douglas MacArthur

The real leader has no need to lead--he is content to point the way - Henry Miller

If your actions inspire others to dream more,learn more, do more and become more,you are a leader - John Quincy Adams


He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander - Aristotle

Balance

The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man - Euripides

We can be sure that the greatest hope for maintaining equilibrium in the face of any situation rests within ourselves - Francis J. Braceland

What I dream of is an art of balance - Henri Matisse

So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within - Jose Ortega y Gasset

I've learned that you can't have everything and do everything at the same time - Oprah Winfrey

Pardon & Forgiveness

Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince's part to pardon - Francis Bacon

Love truth but pardon error - François Marie Arouet

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned - Saint Francis of Assisi

Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them - Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Ambition

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings - C. Archie Danielson

Failure is only postponed success as long as courage coaches ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory - Herbert Kaufman

Ambition and love are the wings to great deeds - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great - Mark Twain

If you have a great ambition, take as big a step as possible in the direction of fulfilling it. The step may only be a tiny one, but trust that it may be the largest one possible for now - Mildred McAfee

Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition - Terry Josephson

Conscience

Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort - Bert Murray

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

To expect to rule others by assuming a loud tone is like thinking oneself tall by putting on high heels - J. Petit-Senn

The wheel that squeaks the loudest Is the one that gets the grease - Josh Billings

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits - William Hazlitt

Counting Money

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted - Albert Einstein

Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession - Charles J. C. Lyall

Keeping accounts, Sir, is of no use when a man is spending his own money, and has nobody to whom he is to account. You won't eat less beef today because you have written down what it cost yesterday - Dr Samuel Johnson

If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars - Jean Paul Getty

People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately - Oscar Wilde

Clock

We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they give us? A bloody clock - Dave Allen

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it - Golda Meir

I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick' ... A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm - James Thurber

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning - Peter De Vries

All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing - Peter M. Leschak

Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially common knowledge - W. Willard Wirtz, US Secretary of Labor

Photography

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasureable it my be - Edward Weston

View a negative experience in your life like you'd look at a photo negative. A single negative can create an unlimited number of positive prints - Gerhard Gschwandtner

No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen - Minor White

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure - Tony Benn

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer, it is my task to reveal it if I can - Yousuf Karsh

Sculptor / Sculpture

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style peculiarly his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones - Henry David Thoreau

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work - Henry Moore

You do not make sculpture because you like wood. That is absurd. You make sculpture because the wood allows you to express something that another material does not allow you to - Louise Bourgeois

Sculpture, by its nature, is a thing. The sculptor is dealing with space itself, rather than the illusion of space - George Rickey

Light & Darkness

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness - Chinese proverb

The darkest hour has only 60 minutes - Morris Mandel

When in the dark is it better to move or stand still? If still, you won't bump into anything - but you won't find the light either - Norm Howe

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars - Og Mandino

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light - Plato

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

What is to give light must endure burning - Viktor Emil Frankl

Newspapers/Journalism

Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive - Gilbert Keith Chesterton

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read - Karl Kraus

Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand - Lord Northcliffe

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands - Oscar Wilde

War

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity - Dwight D. Eisenhower

The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors - François Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

All of us who served in one war or another know very well that all wars are the glory and the agony of the young - Gerald R. Ford

What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country! - Joseph Addison

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve - Albert Schweitzer

Family

Family life is the normal context in which we can learn that a life filled with thinking about others instead of ourselves is the sure road to the most fulfilling joys and satisfactions - Alan Keyes

The most powerful ties are the ones to the people who gave us birth ... it hardly seems to matter how many years have passed, how many betrayals there may have been, how much misery in the family: We remain connected, even against our wills - Anthony Brandt

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them - Desmond Tutu

To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others - Pope John Paul II

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found - Winston Churchill

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together - Erma Louise Bombeck