August 31st
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
— Sir Winston Churchill
August 30th
You're never too old to become younger.
— Mae West
August 29th
Believe nothing against another but on good authority; and never report what may hurt another, unless it be a greater hurt to some other to conceal it.
— William Penn
August 28th
Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
— Kin Hubbard
August 27th
This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.
— Captain J. A. Hadfield
August 26th
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
— Ronald Reagan
August 25th
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
— Mahatma Gandhi
August 24th
To be nobody-but-yourself --- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else --- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
— E.E. Cummings
August 23rd
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
— Carl Jung
August 22nd
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
— James Branch Cabell, THE SILVER STALLION, 1926
August 21st
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
— Samuel Butler
August 20th
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
— Oscar Wilde
August 19th
There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for.
— Tom Robbins
August 18th
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.
— Charles Brower
August 17th
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
— Bern Williams
August 16th
There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.
— Martin Luther
August 15th
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
August 14th
If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?
— Laurence J. Peter
August 13th
It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
— Philip Adams
August 12th
Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.
— Baltasar Gracian
August 11th
What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.
— Epictetus, DISCOURSES
August 10th
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain
August 9th
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
August 8th
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
— Frank Herbert
August 7th
Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.
— Roger Rosenblatt, THE MAN IN THE WATER, 1994
August 6th
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
— G. K. Chesterton
August 5th
Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
— George Washington
August 4th
The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence.
— Robert J. Shiller, IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE
August 3rd
Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.
— George E. Woodberry
August 2nd
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, INWARD HO
August 1st
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.
— Helen Hayes, Roy Newquist's SHOWCASE, 1966
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