A Curated Selection of Quotes (January 2025)

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"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others."

- Jimmy Carter

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"Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two."

- Dame Maggie Smith

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"It’s the human desire in all of us to want to make life better for somebody else. It makes you feel larger. It makes you feel part of the whole human race. "

- Doris Kearns Goodwin

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"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act."

- Søren Kierkegaard

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"Action is the antidote to despair."

- Joan Baez

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"Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart."

- Rumi

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“I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, “You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.” And I said, “But, Daddy, no one's going to see it!” And he said, “Yeah, but I know it's there.””

— Toni Morrison

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“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”

— Toni Morrison

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“Education is learning to grow, learning what to grow toward, learning what is good and bad, learning what is desirable and undesirable, learning what to choose and what not to choose.”

— Abraham Maslow

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“We must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.”

— Wendell Berry

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“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”

— Carl Rogers

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"Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end."

- Rumi

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"I believe in the impossible because no one else does and that gives me an excellent chance at accomplishing it."

- Florence Griffith Joyner

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“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

— James Madison

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"Learning to pivot is more important than learning to plan."

— Nora McInerney

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“15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”

— Noah Smith

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"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

- L.P. Hartley

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"Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular."

- Søren Kierkegaard

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“One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.”

— Wendell Berry

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“If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant.”

— Wendell Berry

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"Democracy is the best revenge."

- Benazir Bhutto

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“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

— Zadie Smith

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“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

— John Steinbeck

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“The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.”

— Albert Schweitzer

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“Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it.”

— Bertrand Russell

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“Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.”

— Albert Schweitzer

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“Health is relative. There is no such thing as an absolute state of health or sickness. Everyone’s physical, mental, and emotional condition is a combination of both.”

— Theodore Isaac Rubin

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“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Theodore Isaac Rubin

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“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

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“It’s just so uninteresting to live without love. Life has not risk. Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event.”

— Toni Morrison

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"We are past due for an infusion of a new kind of institutionalism—a forward leaning variety that speaks to the moment and takes the challenge Donald Trump brings to the rule of law head on."

- Joyce Vance

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"You are perfectly cast in your life. I can’t imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play."

- Lin-Manuel Miranda

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"People who don't write or read poetry are spared the inconvenience of thought."

- Gary Miranda

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"We are the opening verse of the opening page of the chapter of endless possibilities."

- Rudyard Kipling

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“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

— Thomas Carlyle

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“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

— Charles Bukowski

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“We begin to understand the goal of life is to die young — as late as possible!”

— Ashley Montagu

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“The ability to play is one of the principal criteria of mental health.”

— Ashley Montagu

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"Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun."

- Christina Rossetti

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"Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable.”

— L. Frank Baum

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“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

— Erich Fromm

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“We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.”

— Fernando Pessoa

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“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”

— Simone de Beauvoir

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“If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”

— Plato

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"A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong."

– Lewis H. Lapham

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"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."

- Stendhal

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"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

- Winston Churchill

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"The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

- Mahatma Gandhi

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