Quote collection
1.3K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny."
"Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in."
"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
"Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."
"The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."
"Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances."
"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor."
"Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all."
"Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers."
"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."
"He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander."
"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."
"When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end."
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
"No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."
"The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief."
"The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is."
"Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose. Thus, to give money away is quite a simple task, but for the act to be virtuous, the donor must give to the right person, for the right purpose, in the right amount, in the right manner, and at the right time."