Quotes to Get Motivated · Page 25

High-energy words to get you off the couch and into action.

648 quotes · Page 25 of 27

“It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value.”

— David Hume

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”

— David Hume

“In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded more as a dull pastime than as a serious occupation; and is more influenced by particular…”

— David Hume

“That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event.”

— George MacDonald

“God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth.”

— George MacDonald

“It is an art to have so much judgment as to apparel a lie well, to give it a good dressing.”

— Ben Jonson

“If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.”

— Ben Jonson

“But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare—rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?”

— Walter de la Mare

“Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts…”

— Louis Pasteur

“The greatness of human actions is measured by the inspiration that it brings.”

— Louis Pasteur

“Though one discovery always surpasses another, and though the chemical and physical knowledge accumulated since his time has gone beyond all Lavoisier's dreams, his work, like…”

— Louis Pasteur

“I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals…”

— Italo Calvino

“But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more…”

— Italo Calvino

“Labour itself is but a sorrowful song, The protest of the weak against the strong.”

— Frederick William Faber

“With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed: And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall…”

— Omar Khayyam

“Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.”

— John Dewey

“Artist and perceiver alike begin with what may be called a total seizure, an inclusive qualitative whole not yet articulated, not distinguished into members.”

— John Dewey

“The true architectural art, that art toward which I would lead you, rests, not upon scholarship but upon human powers; and, therefore, it is to be tested, not by the fruits of…”

— Louis Sullivan

“If I can do no more, let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do.”

— Louisa May Alcott

“The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under…”

— John Cheever

“The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man’s complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.”

— John Cheever

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