—DUANE MICHALS
Real Dreams
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
—CHARLES F. KETTERING
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
He turns not back who is bound to a star.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI
Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.
—GEORGE SCIALABBA
in Harvard magazine
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night
One of the virtues of being very young is that you don’t let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
—SAM LEVENSON
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
—MAYA ANGELOU
THE BEST REASON FOR HAVING DREAMS . . .
The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.
—ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.
—LANGSTON HUGHES
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
—J. M. POWER
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
—CARL SANDBURG
Slabs of the Sunburnt West
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
Flight to Arras
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
—BETTE DAVIS
The Lonely Life
The years forever fashion new dreams when old ones go. God pity a one-dream man!
—ROBERT GODDARD
A man must have his dreams—memory dreams of the past and eager dreams of the future. I never want to stop reaching for new goals.
—MAURICE CHEVALIER
Dreams and dedication are a powerful combination.
—WILLIAM LONGGOOD
Voices from the Earth
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t have the same horizon.
—KONRAD ADENAUER
The moment after Christmas every child thinks of his birthday.
—STEPHEN UYS
Everything starts as somebody’s daydream.
—LARRY NIVEN
Niven’s Laws
Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams.
—ANN LANDERS
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
—LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Afterthoughts
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be safely insane every night of the week.
—DR. CHARLES FISHER
ESTABLISHING GOALS IS ALL RIGHT . . .
Establishing goals is all right if you don’t let them deprive you of interesting detours.
—DOUG LARSON
Discipline is remembering what you want.
—DAVID CAMPBELL
Goals are dreams with deadlines.
—DIANA SCHARF HUNT
The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never scoring.
—BILL COPELAND
In the long run men hit only what they aim at.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ballpark.
—DAVID OGILVY
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.
—C. S. LEWIS
Keep high aspirations, moderate expectations and small needs.
—H. STEIN
Goals determine what you’re going to be.
—JULIUS ERVING
The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.
—The War Cry
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
—ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.
—GEORGE FISHER
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
—C. ARCHIE DANIELSON
Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take many small steps.
—HELMUT SCHMIDT
I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
—LILY TOMLIN
There is nothing worse than being a doer with nothing to do.
—ELIZABETH LAYTON
THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE . . .
The most important things in life aren’t things.
—Quoted in bulletin of The First Christian Church of Fairfield, Illinois
Origins are of the greatest importance. We are almost reconciled to having a cold when we remember where we caught it.
—MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH
To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.
—GEORGE ORWELL
If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.
—DOUG LARSON
If you can play golf and bridge as though they were games, you’re just about as well adjusted as you are ever going to be.
—Manitoba Co-Operator
The only person you should ever compete with is yourself. You can’t hope for a fairer match.
—TODD RUTHMAN
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
To have more, desire less.
—Table Talk
When we have provided against cold, hunger and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.
—SENECA
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
—C. S. LEWIS
The last thing one knows is what to put first.
—BLAISE PASCAL
We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the lights of every passing ship.
—GEN. OMAR N. BRADLEY
What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.
—NORMAN COUSINS
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
—LAURENCE J. PETER
Take your work seriously but yourself lightly.
—C. W. METCALF
If you treat every situation as a life-and-death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.
—DEAN SMITH
Do
not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
—ELBERT HUBBARD
It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who craves more.
—SENECA
Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.
—H. JACKSON BROWN JR.
Life’s Little Instruction Book
To be upset over what you don’t have is to waste what you do have.
—KEN S. KEYES JR.
Handbook to Higher Consciousness
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
—GEORGE WILL
in Newsweek
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Gift from the Sea
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
—BETTY SMITH
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you’ll find it there.
—ROBB SAGENDORPH
The man who can’t dance thinks the band is no good.
—POLISH PROVERB
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
—GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
In order to maintain a well-balanced perspective, the person who has a dog to worship him should also have a cat to ignore him.
—Peterborough Examiner
CONSCIENCE IS THAT STILL, SMALL VOICE . . .
Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.
—BERT MURRAY
in The Wall Street Journal
Conscience is a small inner voice that doesn’t speak your language.
—Merit Crossword Puzzles Plus
The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
—GAYLORD NELSON
in The New York Times
Conscience is God’s presence in man.
—EMANUEL SWEDENBORG
Reason deceives us; conscience, never.
—JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
—H. L. MENCKEN
A conscience, like a buzzing bee, can make a fellow uneasy without ever stinging him.
—American Farm & Home Almanac
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
—HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
—GEN. H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF
To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
—CONFUCIUS
Self-discipline is when your conscience tells you to do something and you don’t talk back.
—W. K. HOPE
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
—MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
People who wrestle with their consciences usually go for two falls out of three.
—Los Angeles Times Syndicate
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.
—FRENCH PROVERB
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
—THOMAS PAINE
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
—DOUG LARSON
Many people feel “guilty” about things they shouldn’t feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about.
—SYDNEY J. HARRIS
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
—MARK TWAIN
WISDOM IS THE REWARD . . .
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.
—DOUG LARSON
No man was ever wise by chance.
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
—WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
What we do not understand we do not possess.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
—LEWIS MUMFORD
What the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow.
—JAMES STEPHENS
Science at best is not wisdom; it is knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge tempered with judgment.
—LORD RITCHIE-CALDER
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
—SANDRA CAREY
“Next time I will . . .” “From now on I will . . .” What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow?
—HUGH PRATHER
There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it.
—CHARLES KETTERING WITH T. A. BOYD
Prophet of Progress
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself he becomes wise.
—ALDEN NOWLAN
Between Tears and Laughter
Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
—ELBERT HUBBARD
Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
—FELIX FRANKFURTER
The wise person questions himself, the fool others.
—HENRI ARNOLD
The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
—MONTAIGNE
The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.
—SYDNEY J. HARRIS
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.
—NORMAN COUSINS
in Saturday Review
Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.
—DOUG LARSON
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
The Little Prince
The more a man knows, the more he forgives.
—CATHERINE THE GREAT
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
The best-educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
—HELEN KELLER
It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
—ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN
The First Circle
People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.
—SYDNEY J. HARRIS
Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, bu
t wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.
—JOSH BILLINGS
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
—MARIE CURIE
Discretion is knowing how to hide that which we cannot remedy.
—SPANISH PROVERB
THE FIRST SIGN OF MATURITY . . .
The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.
—“SMILE” ZINGERS
in Chicago Tribune
Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child.
—LAURENS VAN DER POST
The Lost World of the Kalahari
A child becomes an adult when he realizes he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
—THOMAS SZASZ