Wise Words About Life – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I love those who yearn for the impossible.

All theory is gray, my friend. But forever green is the tree of life.

A world without love would be no world.

Nothing is worth more than this day.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.

If you’ve never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like.

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.

By seeking and blundering we learn.

A person hears only what they understand.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

This is the true measure of love: when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.

At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

If you would create something, you must be something.

Difficulties increase the nearer we get to the goal.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

It’s true that nothing in this world makes us so necessary to others as the affection we have for them.

Remember to live.

I laugh at my heart, and do its will.

We know accurately only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge.

Doubt can only be removed by action.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

The intelligent man finds everything laughable, the sensible man hardly anything.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Faust: Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, He hardly will be caught a second time.

There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.

Every situation–nay, every moment–is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

He who moves not forward, goes backward.

To be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.

We usually lost today because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

The deed is everything; the fame is nothing.

Do not hurry; do not rest.

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.

Everything transitory is but an image.

Behaviour is a mirror in which every one displays his own image.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

Everyone is deceived in his hopes, cheated in his expectations.

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Wise Words About Life – Leonardo da Vinci

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

If there’s no love, what then?

Life without love, is no life at all.

The knowledge of all things is possible.

Realize that everything connects to everything else.

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

Water is the driving force in nature.

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.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.

All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.

The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

He who thinks little errs much…

To become an artist you have to be curious.

The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment.

He who can copy can do.

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.

Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.

Why does the eye see more clearly when asleep than the imagination when awake?

A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

Time stays long enough for those who use it.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

He who does not oppose evil……commands it to be done.

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

He who wishes to be rich within a day, will be hanged within a year.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking.

Make your work to be in keeping with your purpose.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

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.

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Wise Words About Life – Albert Einstein

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none.

Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Time is an illusion.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling 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 to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.

Imagination is the highest form of research.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.

God is subtle but he is not malicious.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

God does not play dice with the universe.

I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

If there is any religion that could respond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.

I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.

Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

You can not simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

Nationalism is an infantile thing. It is the measles of mankind.

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.

Older men start wars, but younger men fight them.

I love Humanity but I hate humans.

I’d rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.

The human spirit must prevail over technology.

It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

You never fail until you stop trying.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.

We all know that light travels faster than sound. That’s why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Love is a better master than duty.

How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will.

 

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