Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian.
~ Dennis Wholey
When nobody around you seems to measure up it's time to check your yardstick.
~ Bill Lemley
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces marriage is also three meals a day sharing the workload and remembering to carry out the trash.
~ Dr. Joyce Brothers
We [Americans] cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and that at the eleventh hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
~ Brooks Atkinson
There is no such thing as something for nothing.
~ Napoleon Hill
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
~ Erich Fromm
It is arrogance to expect that life will always be music.... Harmony like a following breeze at sea is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost our lot is to tack and tune.
~ Harvey Oxenhorn
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities the strength the wisdom the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.
~ Charlton Ogburn
In nature there are neither rewards or punishments-there are consequences.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll
Hope for a miracle. But don't depend on one.
~ Talmud
Life guarantees a chance-not a fair shake.
~ Anonymous
Life is a perilous voyage.
~ Palladas
One must not hope to be more than one can be.
~ Nicolas De Chamfort
The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.
~ Lady Stella Reading
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Don't fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have the more we want. And for this reason we never have it all.
Try as hard as we may for perfection the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
~ Samuel Mcchord Crothers
We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. That man is best who has fewest.
~ Horace
I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare but I can write a book by me.
~ Sir Walter Raleigh
I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
~ Maurice Maeterlinck
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
~ Johann Von Goethe
The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
~ Margaret Fontey
Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.
~ Jean Vanier
To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.
Of all the young men in America only a few hundred can get into major league baseball and of these only a handful in a decade can get into the Hall of Fame. So it goes in all human activity. ... Some become multimillionaires and chairmen of the board and some of us must be content to play baseball at company picnics or manage a credit union without pay.
~ William Feather
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.
~ Albert Camus
No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.
~ John Morley
You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.
~ Cleveland Amory
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can do.
~ Lin Yutang
Learn to ... be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We cannot all be masters.
~ William Shakespeare
To do all that one is able to do is to be a man to do all that one would like to do is to be a god.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte
No one is expected to achieve the impossible.
~ French Proverb
A hero is a man who does what he can.
~ Romain Rolland
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
~ Charles Dudley Warner
May God ... let me strive for attainable things.
~ Pindar
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
~ Graham Greene
