This is just a sampling of some of our favorite words from the wise. Click on the name for more of their wisdom.
“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.” ~William James
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou
“Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.” ~Democritus
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” ~Charles Dickens
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” ~Henry Brooks Adams
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~Aldous Huxley
“Keep your face to the sunshine and you can never see the shadow.” ~Helen Keller
“The only thing to fear is fear itself.” ~Franklin Roosevelt
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” ~Winston Churchill
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” ~Thomas Edison
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” ~Napoleon Bonaparte
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” ~Aesop
“A small error in the beginning is a great one in the end.” ~Thomas Aquinas
“Violence never settles anything.” ~Genghis Khan
“Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” ~Saint Augustine
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.” ~Sir Isaac Newton
“What worries you, masters you.” ~John Locke
“I think; therefore I am.” ~René Descartes
“The bible shows us not how heaven goes, but how to go to heaven.” ~Galileo Galilei
“Silence is the virtue of fools.” ~Sir Francis Bacon
“Few sinners are saved after the first 20 minutes of a sermon.” ~Mark Twain
“Two roads diverge in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” ~Robert Frost
“There’s two theories to arguin’ with a woman. Neither one works.” ~Will Rogers
“A God who let us prove his existence would be an idol.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” ~C. S. Lewis
“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret to success.” ~Henry Ford
“There are two ways to live your life: One is as though nothing is a miracle — The other is though everything is a miracle.” ~Albert Einstein
“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.” ~Benjamin Franklin
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that is troublesome.” ~Isaac Asimov
“Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.” ~Leonardo da Vinci
“The secret to getting things done is to act.” ~Dante
“Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.” ~Blaise Pascal
“Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.” ~Abraham Lincoln
“Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” ~Aristotle
“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.” ~George Marian Eliot
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” ~Thomas Jefferson
“It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.” ~Will Durant
“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.” ~Voltaire
“What lies beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?” ~Marcus Tullius Cicero
“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” ~Immanuel Kant
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, a sense of humor to console him for what he is.” ~Francis Bacon
“Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.” ~John Wesley
“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.” ~Gilbert Chesterton
“I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.” ~Alexander The Great
“The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.” ~Harriet Beecher Stowe
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” ~Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” ~Antisthenes
“To measure the man, measure his heart.” ~Malcolm S. Forbes
“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.” ~Sam Ewing
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” ~ Woodrow Wilson
“Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.” ~Martin Luther
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~Anais Nin
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” ~Baruch Spinoza
“What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.” ~Henry Van Dyke
“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” ~ Epictetus
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” ~Thomas Jefferson
“Sin will take you farther than you ever expected to go; it will keep you longer than you ever intended to stay, and it will cost you more than you ever expected to pay.” ~ Kay Arthur