Example Quotes - Page 5

• Many of our feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction have their roots in how we compare ourselves to others. When we compare ourselves to those who have more, we feel bad. When we compare ourselves to those who have less, we feel grateful. Even though the truth is we have exactly the same life either way, our feelings about our life can vary tremendously based on who we compare ourselves with. Compare yourself with those examples that are meaningful but that make you feel comfortable with who you are and what you have.

  David Niven

  Meaningful, Grateful, Roots

  David Niven, PhD (2009). “The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• I have heard and seen many examples of the cruelty that we are able to visit on one another during my time. . . I have also seen incredible forgiveness and compassion. Yes, each of us has the capacity for great evil. But for every act of evil there are a dozen acts of goodness in our world that go unnoticed. It is only because we believe that people should be good that we despair when they are not. Indeed, if people condoned the evil, we would be justified in losing hope. But most of the world does not. We know that we are meant for better.

  Desmond Tutu

  Believe, Compassion, Our World

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• And yes, there definitely are many good desires. For example, without the desire for food we would not stay alive. It is when our desire becomes an unquenchable craving or obsession, or causes us to do harm to ourselves or others, that it creates suffering and unhappiness. If you have ever been hurt because you tied your happiness or well-being to a person, place, opinion, self-identity, behavior, or goal, then you have firsthand experience of desire.

  Don Altman

  Hurt, Self, Goal

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• What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: "Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example." She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.

  Bernie Siegel

  Teacher, Failure, Wife

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• A much more radical conclusion . . . that, so far as I know, is shared by only a very few students of public choice [is]: that government employees or people who draw the bulk of their income from government by other means should be deprived of the vote . . . It is another example of the opening up of alternatives for investigation and the presentation of new conceivable policy options characteristic of public choice, rather than a policy that all its students favor.

  Gordon Tullock

  Mean, Government, Opening Up

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• Though I cannot claim to be a Christian in the sectarian sense, the example of Jesus suffering is a factor in the composition of my undying faith in non-violence which rules all my actions, worldly and temporal.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Christian, Jesus, Suffering

  Mahatma Gandhi (1977). “Collected Works”

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• Six traits of effective leaders: 1. Make others feel important 2. Promote a vision 3. Follow the golden rule 4. Admit mistakes 5. Criticize others only in private 6. Stay close to the action Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Leadership, Mistake, Character

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• I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

  Beth Richardson Gutcheon

  Smart, Book, Fiction

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• The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Nations

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• The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

  Walter Lippmann

  Ocean, Men, Thinking

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.454, Harvard University Press

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• After mature deliberation of counsel, the good Queen to establish a rule and immutable example unto all posterity, for the moderation and required modesty in a lawful marriage, ordained the number of six times a day as a lawful, necessary and competent limit.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Sex, Queens, Numbers

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• The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Mirrors, Doctrine, Life Is

  Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton (1711). “Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne: In Three Books with Marginal Notes and Quotations. And an Account of the Author's Life. With a Short Character of the Author and Translator,”, p.231

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• It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Civilization, Mind, Strive

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1908). “Robert Louis Stevenson”

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• No matter what these terrorists do, I refuse to be terrorized. All this requires is just a few alterations in our day to day lives. For example, my first instinct when I receive an envelope full of white powder... is to snort it! I just won't do that this time!

  Margaret Cho

  White, Firsts, Envelopes

  "Margaret Cho: Notorious C.H.O". TV Special, June 13, 2002.

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• Notice, for example, that people who talk about "the joys of childhood" are always adults. Only an adult, utterly remote from the reality of childhood, could suppose it is time of joys.

  Russell Baker

  Children, Reality, People

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• A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

  Russell Baker

  Father, Writing, Exercise

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• For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.

  Sydney Pollack

  Men, Years, President

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• People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

  Gary Saul Morson

  Philosophy, Lying, Book

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• Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example.

  Thomas Browne

  Age, Century, Propose

  Sir Thomas Browne (1844). “Religio Medici [and] Its Sequel Christian Morals”, p.169

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• It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Spiritual, Reflection, Wrath

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook A 11, 1799.

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• There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.

  George Orwell

  Sex, Twelve, Sin

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Now we are all fallen, youth from their fear, And age from that which bred it, good example.

  Ben Jonson

  Age, Youth, Fallen

  Ben Jonson, Robert S. Miola (2000). “Every Man in His Humour: Quarto Version”, p.251, Manchester University Press

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• One example is worth a thousand arguments.

  William E. Gladstone

  Argument, Thousand

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• Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Mother, Men, Weakness

  Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Janet Todd (1989). “The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft”, NYU Press

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• The position of First Lady has no rules, just precedent, so its evolution has been at a virtual standstill for years. If Martha Washington didn't do it, then no one is sure it should be done.

  Paula Poundstone

  Years, Done, Firsts

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