Category: Wisdom (Page 8 of 13)

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) was born in Godalming in Surrey to an intellectual family. He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous biologist and colleague of Darwin. He was also the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold, the brother of scientist and writer Julian Huxley, and the nephew of the best-selling novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward. He attended Eton, during which time his mother died and he developed a serious disease of the eyes that left him partially blind for the rest of his life. These circumstances left the young Huxley unable to pursue the career in medicine as he had intended and instead he took a degree in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Huxley became a journalist in 1919, having already published three books of poetry. Throughout most of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, Huxley lived in Italy where he befriended the novelist D.H. Lawrence. His most famous and significant work is Brave New World (1932), a future-shock tale of genetic manipulation. He wrote much non-fiction during the later years of his life, notably The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) in which he describes his experimentation with mescaline, LSD and peyote. Although many feel that, Brave New World aside, Huxley’s novels are better conceptually than they are literary, he is widely regarded as a genius and a maverick.

“Experience is not what happens to a man, it’s what a man does with what happens to him.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

“The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

“A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered one of the greatest of the German idealist philosophers. He was born at Stuttgart, August 27, 1770. Hegel studied theology at Tbingen, where during his studies he outlined his system with its emphasis on reason rather than the Romantic intuitionism. Hegel had been appointed to an extraordinary professorship at Jena, but the Napoleonic victory there (1806) closed the University and Hegel became editor of a Bamburg newspaper. From 1808 to 1816, he had master of a Nuremberg school, where he instructed the unfortunate boys in his philosophical systems. In his second great work, The Science of Logic (1812, 1816), he set out his famous dialectical Logic. Hegel’s last work was written in Heidelberg, where Hegel became professor in 1816. In 1818 he succeeded Fichte in Berlin and until his death in 1831 was virtually the dictator of German philosophical thinking.

Inspired by the French Revolution in youth, rejoicing with Napoleon in his victory over Prussia at Jena, Hegel’s philosophy eventually turned him into a loyal supporter of that itarian state and a hater of democratic measures, particularly the English Reform Bill. His political philosophy is set out in The Philosophy of Right (1821), and his lecture notes on the History of Philosophy, Philosophy of History and of Art, the latter an important contribution to aesthetics, were published posthumously. Hegel died during a cholera epidemic in 1831. Hegel’s philosophy is a rationalization of his early mysticism, stimulated by Christian theology.

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”

“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”

“What experience and history teach is this – that people and government never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

“Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational.”

Robin Gunn is a contemporary author of inspirational books. She was born April 18, 1955 in Baraboo, Wisconsin. From her website, she writes about her life:

“Robin’s first grade teacher wrote on her report card, ‘Robin keeps the entire class entertained at rug time with her stories.’ Even with such an early affirmation, Robin didn’t think much about becoming a writer during high school or college. She was more intrigued by the idea of traveling to foreign lands and telling people about God’s love. ”

“Robin’s husband also noticed her gift for storytelling and urged her to attend a writers’ conference. That first conference, in 1979, opened the door for publication of devotions, articles, interviews and over a dozen children’s books.”

“If you feel far from God, guess who moved?”

“When one heart opens to another heart, it usually results in love.”

“Take it and be thankful.”

“When in doubt chicken out.”

“I look back now and realize that the gift of a true friend is that she sees you not the way you see yourself or the way others see you. A true friend sees you for who you are and who you can become.”

“It’s funny whom we end up choosing to love and who ends up choosing to love us. It’s rarely the people we think it should be.”

“”There are two words that you should use frequently in your youth: ´sorry´ and ´thank-you´. Use the first one as often as possible, so that on your death bed all that you have to say to your friends is ´thank-you!´.”

Better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ted’s father, Theodor Robert, and grandfather were brewmasters in the city. His mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, often soothed her children to sleep by “chanting” rhymes remembered from her youth. Ted credited his mother with both his ability and desire to create the rhymes for which he became so well known.

Ted left Springfield as a teenager to attend Dartmouth College, where he became editor-in-chief of the Jack-O-Lantern, Dartmouth’s humor magazine. Although his tenure as editor ended prematurely when Ted and his friends were caught throwing a drinking party, which was against the prohibition laws and school policy, he continued to contribute to the magazine, signing his work “Seuss.” This is the first record of the “Seuss” pseudonym, which was both Ted’s middle name and his mother’s maiden name.

To please his father, who wanted him to be a college professor, Ted went on to Oxford University in England after graduation. However, his academic studies bored him, and he decided to tour Europe instead. Oxford did provide him the opportunity to meet a classmate, Helen Palmer, who not only became his first wife, but also a children’s author and book editor.

After returning to the United States, Ted began to pursue a career as a cartoonist. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications published some of his early pieces, but the bulk of Ted’s activity during his early career was devoted to creating advertising campaigns for Standard Oil, which he did for more than 15 years.

After Ted’s first wife died in 1967, Ted married an old friend, Audrey Stone Geisel, who not only influenced his later books, but now guards his legacy as the president of Dr. Seuss Enterprises.

At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, Ted had written and illustrated 44 children’s books, including such all-time favorites as Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, Fox in Socks, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. His books had been translated into more than 15 languages. Over 200 million copies had found their way into homes and hearts around the world.

Besides the books, his works have provided the source for eleven children’s television specials, a Broadway musical and a feature-length motion picture. Other major motion pictures are on the way. His honors included two Academy awards, two Emmy awards, a Peabody award and the Pulitzer Prize.

“Be who you are and say how you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own.
And you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.”

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!”

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons.
It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

“You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.”

“As you partake of the world’s bill of fare, that’s darned good advice to follow – Do a lot of spitting out the hot air – And be careful what you swallow.”

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

“You have to be odd to be number one”

“To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world.”

“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”

“I know it may seem small and insignificant, but it’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become. That’s not a seed, any more than you’re just a boy.”

“Sometimes you will never know the value of something, until it becomes a memory.”

“Only you can control your future.”

“You have brains In your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose”

“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.”

“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

Gandi’s Seven Deadly Sins:

Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, one of the most influential figures in modern social and political activism, considered these traits to be the most spiritually perilous to humanity.

1. Wealth without Work
2. Pleasure without Conscience
3. Science without Humanity
4. Knowledge without Character
5. Politics without Principle
6. Commerce without Morality
7. Worship without Sacrifice

Other Gandhi quotes:

“No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.”

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without heart.”

“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall – think of it, always.”

“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind.”

“Noncooperation with evil is a much a duty as cooperation with good.”

“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

“We must become the change we want to see in the world.”

The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – that is where the battle should be fought.”

“Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.”

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

“A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. This was a perfect act.”

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the oldest of seven children. He entered the University of Pisa in 1581 to study medicine. Soon he realized that his interests were not in medicine, but mathematics. After only a year in the university, he made his famous discovery on the movement of pendulums.

He then continued an independent study of science and mathematics while trying to convince his father to allow him to study science and math. In 1586 Galileo withdrew from the University of Pisa without a degree and headed back to live with his family. For the next few years he continued his study of science and gave a series of lectures on the Inferno of Dante’s The Divine Comedy at the Florentine Academy. Galileo had many influential friends who were able to help him gain an appointment as a lecturer of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1859 and then as the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua in 1592.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

“Doubt is the father of invention.”

“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.”

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

“The bible shows us not how heaven goes, but how to go to heaven.”

“You can not teach a man anything. You can only help him to find it within himself.”

Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963 ) was one of America’s leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Frost wrote poems often associated with rural New England, whose philosophical dimensions transcended both traditional and experimental, regional and universal. After his father’s death in 1885, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy.

In 1912, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. The Frosts sailed back for the United States in 1915. The proceeds from his early books enabled Frost to buy a farm in Franconia, N.H., to place new poems in literary periodicals and to continue publishing. Frost embarked on a long career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. In 1924 he received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Over the years he received an unprecedented number and range of literary, academic, and public honors. Robert Frost is buried in Bennington Vermont in the cemetery at the First Congregational Church (See Story Entitled Road Trip).

“Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.”

“Two roads diverge in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

“To be social is to be forgiving.”

“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

“A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.”

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”

“The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.”

“The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”

“Thinking isn’t agreeing or disagreeing. That’s voting.”

“You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.”

(1706 – 1790) American statesman, printer, scientist, and writer. The only American of the colonial period to earn a European reputation as a natural philosopher, he is best remembered in the United States as a patriot and diplomat.

Benjamin Franklin was the son of a tallow chandler and soapmaker, Franklin left school at 10 years of age to help his father. He later (1723) went to Philadelphia to work as a printer. His industry knowledge and thrift qualities helped him to better himself. His common sense philosophy and his neatly turned phrases won public attention in the Gazette, in the later General Magazine, and especially in his Poor Richards Almanack, which he published from 1732 to 1757. Many sayings of Poor Richard, praising prudence, common sense, and honesty, became standard American proverbs.

Franklin had steadily extended his own knowledge by study of foreign languages, philosophy, and science. He repeated the experiments of other scientists and showed his usual practical bent by inventing such diverse things as the Franklin stove, bifocal eyeglasses, and a glass harmonica. The phenomenon of electricity interested him deeply, and in 1748 he turned his printing business over to his foreman, intending to devote his life to science. His spectacular experiment of flying a kite in a thunderstorm, which proved that lightning is an electrical discharge, and his invention of the lightning rod were among a series of investigations that won him recognition from the leading scientists in England and on the Continent.

Franklin held local public offices and served as deputy postmaster general of the colonies. As such he reorganized the postal system, making it both efficient and profitable. His status as a public figure grew steadily. He worked for the British cause in the French and Indian War. Franklins deep love for his native land and his devotion to individual freedom. In 1776, he was appointed to the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, which he signed. In 1785 Benjamin Franklin was made president of the Pennsylvania executive council. The last great service rendered to his country by this wisest American, as he is sometimes called, was his part in the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although his proposal of a single-chamber congress was rejected, he helped to direct the compromise that brought the Constitution of the United States into being. Though not completely satisfied with the finished product, he worked earnestly for its ratification.

“Tell Me and I Forget; Teach Me and I May Remember; Involve Me and I Learn”

“Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.”

“Never confuse motion with action.”

“I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works … I mean real good works … hot holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing … or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.”

“If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”

“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.”

“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade.”

“Well done is better than well said.”

“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”

Industrialist, inventor. Born July 30, 1863 in Dearborn, Michigan, into a farming family. The first child of William and Mary Ford, he was taught largely by his mother, who instilled in him a strong sense of responsibility, duty, and self-reliance. As a young man he became an excellent self-taught mechanic and machinist. At age 16 he left the farm and went to nearby Detroit, where he worked as an apprentice in a machine shop. Months later he began to work with steam engines at the Detroit Dry Dock Co., where he first saw the internal combustion engine, the kind of engine he would later use to make his automobiles.

When he was 28 Ford took a job with Thomas Edison’s Detroit Illuminating Company, where he became chief engineer. In his spare time he began to build his first car. In 1903 Ford launched his own car company, the Ford Motor Car Company, and by January 1904 he had sold 658 vehicles. By 1908 he built the famous Model T, a car that was affordable to the middle class. Sales of the Model T increased to 720,000 by 1916.

Ford was able to make a reliable and inexpensive automobile primarily because of his introduction of the innovative moving assembly line into the process of industrial manufacturing. The assembly line was undoubtedly Ford’s greatest contribution to industry. It revolutionized manufacturing and made it possible to make uniform products quickly and affordably.

Driven by his childhood sense of duty and obligation, Ford was also an active philanthropist throughout his life. He built a hospital for his employees in Detroit, and in 1936 established the Ford Foundation for the purposes of “advancing human welfare.” The foundation makes grants through its headquarters and ten international field offices. For fiscal year 2014, it reported assets of US$12.4 billion and approved US$507.9 million in grants. The grants support projects that focus on reducing poverty and injustice; promoting democratic values; and advancing human knowledge, creativity and achievement.

Ford died at his estate, Fairlane, in Dearborn, Michigan in 1947 at the age of 84.

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”

“Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret to success.”

“There isn’t a person anywhere that isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can.”

“You can’t build your reputation on what you’re going to do.”

“An airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

“The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed .”

“Life is a series of experience, each of which makes us bigger even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward.”

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”

“Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”

“If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.”

“Don’t find a fault. Find a remedy.”

“Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.”

Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990) was born in New York City. After receiving a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for his bravery at the Battle of Aachen in World War II, he joined his family’s publishing business. He won the Republican nomination for Governor of New Jersey in 1957, but was defeated in the election by Democrat Robert Meyner.

In 1957 he also became editor and publisher of Forbes, a then-floundering business magazine founded by his father 40 years before. Circulation and profits soared, making him a multimillionaire. He became known for his extravagant parties and colorful hobbies, from hot-air ballooning to collecting Faberg eggs.

He and his wife Roberta had five children. His son, Malcolm Jr. (known as Steve), became President and CEO of Forbes, Inc. in 1990. In 1996, Steve Forbes ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for president.

“Diamonds are nothing more than chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs.”

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

“Failure is success if we learn from it.”

“When you cease to dream you cease to live.”

“It’s more fun to arrive a conclusion than to justify it.”

“People who matter are most aware that everyone else does too.”

“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”

“The more sympathy you give, the less you need.”

“To measure the man, measure his heart.”