TheTeach.com
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TheTeach.com
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These are things to ponder and reflect on. Maybe they'll make us think better, maybe they'll make us reconsider or whatever, but for a fact they'll help us feel something. theteach
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want
to test a man's character, give him power." - "I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive." Albert Einstein "We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about." Joseph Epstein "Four Rules For Life; Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results." Angeles Arrien "What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'." Marilyn Vos Savant "The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone." Orison Swett Marden "The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract." Oliver Wendell Holmes "An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child." Carl Gustav Jung "The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week." Robert Frost
"In a
time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned
usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." Susan B Anthony
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever
may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they
cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." "How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?" Harry S. Truman "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." Aesop "The life that conquers is the life that moves with a steady resolution and persistence toward a predetermined goal. Those who succeed are those who have thoroughly learned the immense importance of plan in life, and the tragic brevity of time." W.J. Davison "It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone." John Maynard Keynes "If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves. You can gain more control over your life by paying closer attention to the little things." Emily Dickinson "When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary." William Wordsworth "Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." William Faulkner
"Experience is not what happens
to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him."
"If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the
shoulders of giants."
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t
believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who
get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them,
make them."
"Who controls the past
controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
"God,
give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage
to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the
one from the other."
"It is not what we do, but also
what we do not do, for which we are accountable." "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." Elie Wiesel "Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." Carl Sandburg
"Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I - "Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness." Henrik Ibsen "Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them." Albert Einstein "It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese." Carl Sagan "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." Edmund Burke "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." Marshall McLuhan "To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." Bessie Stanley
"How
far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and
strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these."
"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving." Albert Einstein "All of us could take a lesson from the weather, it pays no attention to criticism."
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows."
"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." Anais Nin
"The way to develop
self-confidence is to do the thing you fear."
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." George Bernard Shaw "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." W. B. Yeats "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest-- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein "Our lives are frittered away by detail; simplify, simplify." Henry David Thoreau "You are today where your thoughts have brought you, you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When
once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes
turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to
return." "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind." William Blake "I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man—public opinion." Clarence Seward Darrow "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde "Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." Franklin D. Roosevelt "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Laurence J. Peter "When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I'm slipping." Maria Callas
"If
more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a
merrier world."
"Read, every day, something no
one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do,
every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the
mind to continually be part of unanimity."
"A
hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based
on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in
order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to
the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
"Joy is not in things; it is in us." Richard Wagner
"The world that we have made as a result
of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we
cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them... We shall
require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive."
"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself.
Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels
in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."
"People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun's
out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there
is light within." "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." Vincent Van Gogh "A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain." Robert Frost "Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it." Woodrow Wilson
"Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people who have the habit of
making excuses."
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t
believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who
get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them,
make them." "No legacy is so rich as honesty." William Shakespeare
"The
great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired
because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day
after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration."
"Joy
can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a
definite object in life outside themselves and their own personal happiness."
"I'd rather be a failure at something I
enjoy than a success at something I hate."
"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you
take your eyes off the goal."
"It is easy to live for
others. Everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves." "Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. Routines have their purposes, but the merely routine is the hidden enemy of high art." Cecil Beaton
"There is nothing either bad or
good, but thinking makes it so." "The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is 'look under foot.' You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world." John Burroughs "Beware the fury of the patient man." John Dryden "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." E. B. White
"Natural abilities are
like natural plants; they need pruning by study."
"The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him." Voltaire (1694–1778) "We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it." Jules Renard "All things are possible until they are proved impossible - and even the impossible may only be so, as of now." Pearl S. Buck "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." Harry S. Truman
"No pleasure philosophy, no sensuality, no place nor
power, no material success can for a moment give such inner satisfaction as the
sense of living for good purposes, for maintenance of integrity, for the
preservation of self-approval." "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it." William Styron "Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking our potential." Winston Churchill "It is a good thing to be rich, it is a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends." Euripides (480 or 485–406 B.C.) "You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings." Pearl S. Buck "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it." Johann von Goethe (1749–1832) "The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself." Robert Green Ingersoll "The heart has reasons that reason does not understand." Blaise Pascal (1623–62) "A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us." Maltbie Babcock "Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due." William R. Inge (1913–73) "Nature does nothing uselessly." Aristotle "In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time." Leonardo da Vinci "A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia." David McCullough "One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life." Anne Morrow Lindbergh "Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger." Franklin P. Jones
"It is paradoxical
that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning
and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them."
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." T.H. Huxley "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in." Greek proverb "If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." Charles Kettering 1876-1958 "When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice." William James "Never bear more than one trouble at a
time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and
all they expect to have." "It was the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world." John Cheever (1912–82) "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats Life may not be the
party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain (1835–1910) "Times are bad. Children no longer obey
their parents, and everyone is writing a book." "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." Galileo Galilei "Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell." Studs Terkel "That we alone have the power within us to solve our problems, relieve our anxieties and pain, heal our illnesses, improve our golf game or get a promotion." Rev. Eric Butterworth "Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one's whole being into the being of another." Martin Luther King, Jr. "Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them." Goethe (1749–1832) "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." Samuel Johnson "The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind." Emily Dickinson "Man is not the sum of what he has but the total of what he does not yet have, of what he might have." Jean Paul Sartre "The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness." Albert Einstein "When you want to test the depths of a stream, don't use both feet." Chinese Proverb "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." Maya Angelou "Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome." Samuel Johnson The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure." Grayson Kirk"Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." Will Durant (1885–1981) "Never cut what you can untie." Joseph Joubert "Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes
its values only to its scarcity" "The death of democracy is not
likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from
apathy, indifference, and undernourishment." "The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. " G.C. Lichtenberg | "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity." George Orwell "Knowledge -- Zzzzzp! Money - Zzzzzp! -- Power! That's the cycle democracy is built on!" Tennessee Williams "The reason so many people never get anywhere in life is because when opportunity knocks, they are out in the backyard looking for four-leaf clovers." Walter Percy Chrysler "Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich - simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself." Henry Miller (1891–1980) "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." Albert Einstein "Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925 "If is doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it." D.H. Lawrence 1885–1930 "The flower that follows the sun does so even on cloudy days." Robert Leighton "There is no fatigue so
wearisome as that which comes from lack of work." "A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner." English proverb "Technology ... the knack of so
arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
"Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." Sydney J. Harris 1917-1986 "If A equals success, then the formula is: A=X+Y+Z.
X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." "Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Ralph Waldo Emerson "I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming." Goethe (1749-1832) "A teacher affects eternity and he
can never tell where his influence stops." "A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own." H.G. Wells "Today is the first day for starting the rest of your life..
Tomorrow is being made Today" "Genius is one percent inspiration and
ninety-nine percent perspiration." "The chains of habit are too
weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." "We fall short of presenting all, or even a goodly part, of the news each day that a citizen would need to intelligently exercise his franchise in this democracy. So as he depends more and more on us, presumably the depth of knowledge of the average man is diminished. This clearly can lead to a disaster in democracy." Walter Cronkite "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." Albert Einstein "Having served on various committees, I have drawn up a list of rules: Never arrive on time; this stamps you as a beginner. Don’t say anything until the meeting is half over; this stamps you as being wise. Be as vague as possible; this avoids irritating the others. When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed. Be the first to move for adjournment; this will make you popular; it’s what everyone is waiting for." Harry Chapman "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true." Nathaniel Hawthorne "To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style." Aldous Huxley "Those who bring sunshine to the
lives of others cannot keep it from themselves." "Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success." Brian Adams "An expert is one who knows more and more about
less and less." "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something." Plato "The best and most beautiful
things in the world "Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye." Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley "There is no valid distinction between being clever and being well-informed. The two are so often confused as to be indistinguishable. In many situations information is so great a part of effectiveness that without information a clever person cannot get started. With information a much less clever person can get very far." Edward de Bono "If asked for a brief explanation, I would say that the existential vacuum derives from the following conditions. Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do - which is conformism - or he does what other people wish him to do - which is totalitarianism." Viktor Frankl "Do not wish to be anything but what you are and try to be that perfectly." -St. Francis De Sales "The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress." Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life." Theodore Roosevelt "Look to the future and not to
the past to find those things you want to make last." "Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose." Lyndon B. Johnson "The future will depend on what
we do in the present." "Experience is the name everyone
gives to their mistakes." "No man is good enough to govern
another man without the other's consent." "As people grow up, they cease to play and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gain from playing." Sigmund Freud "I never think of the future. It comes soon
enough." "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create that fact." William James "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms --to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Viktor E. Frankl "He who says, what is mine is yours and what is
yours is yours is a saint. "Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell." Edward Abbey "Better late than never." "Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world." Charles F. Kettering "Ask me no questions, and I'll
tell you no lies." "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy
and wealthy and wise." "When in doubt, tell the
truth." "We learn to speak by
speaking." "...ask not what your country
can do for you -ask what you can do for your country." "To be ignorant of one's
ignorance is the malady of the ignorant." "...time is money." "Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done." Lewis Thomas "Will
is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact." H.G.
Wells
"Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time." Goethe 1749–1832 "A friend in need is a friend indeed." "Some books are to be tasted, "To be, or not to be: that is the question." William Shakespeare "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." Winston Churchill "It never will rain roses; when
we want to have more roses we must plant more trees." "He travels the fastest who
travels alone."
"You can fool some of the people
all of the time, "Civilization means a society
based upon the opinion of civilians." "The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature." Alexander Solzhenitsyn "One may smile, and smile, and be
a villain." "Blessing on him that first invented
sleep!" "Be the change you want to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi "There is nothing good or bad,
but thinking makes it so." "The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means." Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) "Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, Make Me Feel Important. Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life." Mary Kay Ash "Bad news travels fast." "There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust." Sophocles "There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers." Erich Fromm "It is far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt |
