Facts
- A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.
-- Claude Bernard
- A concept is stronger than a fact.
-- Charlotte P. Gillman
- Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get 'em, get 'em right, or they will get you wrong.
-- Thomas Fuller
- Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-- Thomas Huxley
- Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
-- Mark Twain
- Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
-- William C. Redfield
- Comment is free but facts are sacred.
-- Charles P. Scott
- We should keep so close to facts that we never have to remember the second time what we said the first time.
-- F. Marion Smith
- A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
-- Thomas Huxley
- Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru
- If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.
-- Bernard M. Baruch
- I often wish ... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
-- Anon.
Failure
- The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything--and it works.
-- William Strong
- A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed--I well know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself.
-- Georges Clemenceau
- I have no use for men who fail. The cause of their failure is no business of mine, but I want successful men as my associates.
-- John D. Rockefeller
- Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
-- Thomas A. Edison
- Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
-- Oscar Wilde
- A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in the experience.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
- Never give a man up until he has failed at something he likes.
-- Lewis E. Lawes
- A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
-- John Burroughs
- Failures are divided into two classes--those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.
-- John Charles Salak
- Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
-- James Russell Lowell
- The only people who never fail are those who never try.
-- Ilka Chase
- Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.
-- George Washington Carver
- He's no failure. He's not dead yet.
-- William Lloyd George
Faith
- When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead.
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
- Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
-- H. L. Mencken
- We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- I always prefer to believe the best of everybody--it saves so much trouble.
-- Rudyard Kipling
- Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
-- William Ellery Channing
- It's not dying for faith that's so hard, it's living up to it.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray
- The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.
-- Ecclesiastes 11:1
- I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
-- Oscar Wilde
Fame
- Even the best things are not equal to their fame.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- The lust of fame is the last that a wise man shakes off.
-- Tacitus
- Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate.
-- Emily Dickinson
- The fame of great men ought to be judged always by the means they used to acquire it.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- It often happens that those of whom we speak least on earth are best known in heaven.
-- Nicolas Caussin
- Fame is vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.
-- Horace Greeley
- Fame: an embalmer trembling with stage fright.
-- H. L. Mencken
- The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
-- George Santayana
- Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Fame is proof that people are gullible.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton
- If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.
-- Martial
Familiarity
- All objects lose by too familiar a view.
-- John Dryden
- Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
-- Ouida
- Nothing is wonderful when you get used to it.
-- Ed Howe
- Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Familiarity breeds contempt--and children.
-- Mark Twain
- Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
-- William Hazlitt
- When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.
-- Joseph Addison
- Familiarity is the root of the closest friendships, as well as the intensest hatreds.
-- Antoine Rivarol
Family
- The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-- George Santayana
- Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
- None but a mule denies his family.
-- Anon.
- A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
-- Ogden Nash
- The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.
-- Ring Lardner
- He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
-- John Bowring
- The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended--and not to take a kint when a hint isn't intended.
-- Robert Frost
- Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
-- Ed Howe
- I would rather start a family than finish one.
-- Don Marquis
- If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Fidelity
- An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren't.
-- Sacha Guitry
- Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.
-- Cicero
- Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues.
-- Giuseppe Mazzini
- Another of our highly prized virtues is fidelity. We are immensely pleased with ourselves when we are faithful.
-- Ida Ross Wylie
- It goes far toward making a man faithful to let him understand that you think him so; and he that does but suspect I will deceive him gives me a sort of right to do it.
-- Seneca
- Fidelity is seven-tenths of business success.
-- James Parton
- It is better to be faithful than famous.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
Finance
- One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.
-- Will Rogers
- There is no such thing as an innocent purchaser of stocks.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
- Financial sense is knowing that certain men will promise to do certain things, and fail.
-- Ed Howe
- The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.
-- Woodrow Wilson
- Alexander Hamilton originated the put and take system in our national treasury: the taxpayers put it in, and the politicians take it out.
-- Will Rogers
- A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.
-- Will Rogers
- The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- A financier is a pawn-broker with imagination.
-- Arthur Wing Pinero
- High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts.
-- Finley Peter Dunne
Firmness
- Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility it becomes rashness or obstinacy.
-- J. Swarlz
- Real firmness is good for anything; strut is good for nothing.
-- Alexander Hamilton
- When firmness is sufficient, rashness is unnecessary.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
- The purpose firm is equal to the deed.
-- Edward Young
- It is only persons of firmness that can have real gentleness. Those who appear gentle are, in general, only a weak character, which easily changes into asperity.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- That which is called firmness in a king is called obstinacy in a donkey.
-- Lord Erskine
- The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.
-- Lord Chesterfield
- The superior man is firm in the right way, and not merely firm.
-- Confucius
Flattery
- Always let your flattery be seen through for what really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Flattery is from the teeth out. Sincere appreciation is from the heart out.
-- Dale Carnegie
- It is easy to flatter; it is harder to praise.
-- Jean Paul Richter
- It is better to fall among crows than flatterers; for those devour only the dead--these the living.
-- Antisthenes
- Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise.
-- William Penn
- Knavery and flattery are blood relations.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
-- Josh Billings
- None are more taken in with flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
-- Benedict Spinoza
Flattery
- What the fool does in the end, the wise man does in the beginning.
-- Proverb
- Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.
-- George Chapman
- No fools are so troublesome as those who have some wit.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Fools grow without watering.
-- Thomas Fuller
- A fool can no more see his own folly than he can see his ears.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray
- To be a man's own fool is bad enough; but the vain man is everybody's.
-- William Penn
- Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed.
-- Mark Twain
- Nobody can describe a fool to the life, without much patient self-inspection.
-- Frank Moore Colby
- The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.
-- Josh Billings
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