Perseverance
- There is no failure except in no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.
-- Kin Hubbard
- Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.
-- Sydney Harris
- The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.
-- Plutarch
- We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee
- No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Consider the postage stamp, my son. It secures success through its ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
-- Josh Billings
- By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
-- Edmund Burke
- Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
-- Christopher Morley
Personality
- Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
-- Mark Twain
- Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
-- Don Marquis
- If you have anything really valuable to contribute to the world it will come through the expression of your own personality, that single spark of divinity that sets you off and makes you different from every other living creature.
-- Bruce Barton
- Personality is to a man what perfume is to a flower.
-- Charles M. Schwab
- Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.
-- Martin Heidegger
Pessimism
- My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.
-- Edmond Rostand
- A pessimist is one who feels bad when he feels good for fear he'll feel worse when he feels better.
-- Anonymous
- Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
-- Bernard De Voto
- Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.
-- Philander Johnson
Philosophy
- Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
- Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
-- James A. Froude
- Philosophy triumphs easily over past and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
-- Aristotle
- It is easy to build a philosophy--it doesn't have to run.
-- Charles F. Kettering
- Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
-- Francis Bacon
- All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.
-- Epictetus
- Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.
-- Bertrand Russell
- If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
-- Jean-Paul Satre
- The Greek philosophers began by asking fundamental questions about the nature of life, the universe, and thought itself. They soon discovered that the answers to these questions were not forthcoming, nor likely to be.
-- Tom Weller (Cvltvre Made Stupid, 1987)
- [W]hen people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
-- Bertrand Russell (Theory of Knowledge)
Photography
- The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
-- Dorthea Lange
- In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular . . . sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.
-- Ansel Adams
- A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
-- Diane Arbus
- The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
-- Elizabeth Bowen
- Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us ro see.
-- Dorthea Lange
- I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do -- that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.
-- Diane Arbus
- If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.
-- James McNeill Whistler
- Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
-- Ansel Adams
- You don't take a photograph, you make it.
-- Ansel Adams
- There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
-- Ansel Adams
Pity
- She knows as well as anyone that pity, having played, soon tires.
-- Edwin Arlington Robinson
- We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced.
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
-- Don Marquis
- Pity is not natural to man. Children and savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; but we have not pity unless we wish to relieve him.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Compassion is the only one of the human emotions the Lord permitted Himself and it has carried the divine flavor ever since.
-- Dagobert D. Runes
- Pity costs nothing, and it ain't worth nothing.
-- Josh Billings
Planning
- No more prizes for predicting rain. Prizes only for building arks.
-- Anonymous
- In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.
-- Saki
Pleasure
- In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
-- Honoré de Balzac
- To make pleasures pleasant shorten them.
-- Charles Buxton
- There is no sterner moralist than pleasure.
-- Lord Byron
- Pleasure's couch is virtue's grave.
-- Augustine J. Duganne
- Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
-- H. L. Mencken
- We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.
-- John Petit-Senn
- That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Poetry
- It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
-- Aristotle
- The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.
-- Earle Birney
- For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
-- Maxwell Bodenheim
- Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
- Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth--the true poet is very near the oracle.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
- Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny.
-- Mikhail Dudan
- Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
-- Paul Engle
- Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
-- Robert Frost
- Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.
-- Robert Frost
- Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
-- Robert Frost
- There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
-- Graves
- When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
-- Randall Jarell
- You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
-- Joseph Joubert
- When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
-- Marianne Moore
- The courage of the Poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-- Christopher Morley
- Poets arent very useful
Because they aren't consumeful or produceful..
-- Ogden Nash
- For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
-- Sylvia Plath
- Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
-- Plato
- With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
-- Edgar Allan Poe
- Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
-- Carl Sandburg
- Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
-- Carl Sandburg
- In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
-- Wallace Stevens
- The poet is the priest of the invisible.
-- Wallace Stevens
- A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
-- Dylan Thomas
- The job of the poet is to render the world--to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
-- Mark Van Doren
- To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
-- Walt Whitman
- Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
-- William Butler Yeats
Politics
- The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.
-- John Jay Chapman
- A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature.
-- Lord Bryce
- A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.
-- J. F. Clarke
- There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.
-- Richard M. Nixon
- The political world is stimulating. It's the most interesting thing you can do. It beats following the dollar.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H. L. Mencken
- Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
-- Charles de Gaulle
- I'd rather keep my promises to other politicians than to God. God, at least, has a degree of forgiveness.
-- Anonymous Politician
- I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.
-- Harry S. Truman
- Politics makes strange bed-fellows.
-- Charles Dudley Warner
- I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
-- Socrates
- He has been called a mediocre man; but this is unwarranted flattery. He was a politician of monumental littleness.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
- Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.
-- Winston Churchill
- Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
-- Nikita Khrushchev
- The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
- Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- Politics is not an exact science.
-- Otto von Bismarck
- The only way you can do that [decrease taxes, balance the budget, and increase military spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.
-- John B. Anderson
- Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Politics is the art of the possible.
-- Otto von Bismarck
- Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Politics: (noun) From Greek, poly, meaning many, and ticks, meaning bloodsuckers.
-- Anon
- Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
-- Eugene McCarthy
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