Words to Live By – Quotes

chinatown morning, nyc

Ah, well then I suppose I shall have to die beyond my means. ~ Oscar Wilde

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.  ~Henry David Thoreau

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.  ~Socrates

The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitudes. ~ Victor Frankl

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste.  The gain in self-confidence of having achieved a tiresome labor is immense. ~ Arnold Bennet

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, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr

The sun is but a morning star. ~ Henry David Thoreau

May you live all the days of your life. ~ Jonathan Swift

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Most of us spend our lives as if we had another one in the bank.  ~ Ben Irwin

Seize the hour. ~ Sophocles

Time isn’t a commodity, something you pass around like cake. Time is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give your time, they’re really asking for a chunk of your life. ~ Antoinette Bosco

He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. ~ Marcus Aurelius

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide. ~ Emily Bronte

You don’t have a soul.  You are a Soul.  You have a body. ~ CS Lewis

We are what we believe we are. ~ CS Lewis

Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps. ~ David Lloyd George

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten–happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another. ~ Brenda Ueland

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

~ JRR Tolkien

I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, “Ain’t that the truth.”  ~Quincy Jones

“Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think.” ~ Mark Twain

Shell of Ancient Church in the Former Armenian Capital of Ani, now in Turkey

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.” ~ P.G. Wodehouse

In a thousand words I can have the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
~ Roy H. Williams