Joe's quotes

(showing 1-50 of 94)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

tags: activism, apathy, hate, indifference, love, opposite, philosophy
7,014 people liked it

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: action, change, inspirational, philosophy, wish
11,286 people liked it

"It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result."
— Mahatma Gandhi

tags: action, fruit, goodness
45 people liked it

"If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with the children."
— Mahatma Gandhi

39 people liked it

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither
6,105 people liked it

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: accomplishment, be-yourself, conformity, individuality, world
6,697 people liked it

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

tags: inspirational, life, live, miracle, miracles
5,637 people liked it

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

tags: humor
5,592 people liked it

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

4,723 people liked it

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

tags: do-wrong, love, trust, wrong
3,683 people liked it

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

tags: life
3,637 people liked it

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them."
— Mother Teresa

tags: judge, judgemental, love, time
4,117 people liked it

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

tags: humor, open-mind, thinking
2,912 people liked it

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi

tags: courage, deeply-loved, love, strength
3,479 people liked it

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
— Maya Angelou

tags: angelou, maya
4,842 people liked it

"Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car."
— Garrison Keillor

tags: humor, religion
3,844 people liked it

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

tags: books, library
3,095 people liked it

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

tags: friendship
2,979 people liked it

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: reading
2,967 people liked it

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

tags: love
2,785 people liked it

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."
— Shel Silverstein

tags: inspirational
2,409 people liked it

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

tags: christian, humor, philosophy, theology
1,916 people liked it

"The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope."
— Barack Obama

tags: hope, service, work
143 people liked it

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: writing
156 people liked it

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman

tags: activism, service
230 people liked it

"There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
— Mark Twain

8 people liked it

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
— Elizabeth Drew

20 people liked it

"All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

764 people liked it

"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."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

tags: inspiration
137 people liked it

"And so I pray I am today as honest
with myself, with life all around me and below and above me,
with all who I encounter."
— Jimmy Santiago Baca (Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande)

tags: ethics, poetry, writing
1 person liked it

"1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don't Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret."
— Miguel Ruiz

tags: spirituality, toltec, wisdom
98 people liked it

"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

tags: integrity
3,713 people liked it

"Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."
— Malcolm Gladwell

tags: writing
2 people liked it

"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

tags: insight
15 people liked it

"Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

tags: behavior, cultural, legacies
11 people liked it

"Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking."
— Malcolm Gladwell

tags: decisions
12 people liked it

"Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

tags: achievement
6 people liked it

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

tags: decisions, knowledge, understanding
38 people liked it

"I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing....It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

7 people liked it

"It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”"
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

6 people liked it

"Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

tags: intuition
13 people liked it

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."
— Tim O'Brien

tags: fiction, writing
6 people liked it

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

14 people liked it

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

tags: writing
1 person liked it

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

tags: war
32 people liked it

"The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends."
— Craig M. Mullaney (The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education)

tags: afghanistan, war
1 person liked it

"Keep me in your heart and know that however great the distance, I am with you always."
— Craig M. Mullaney (The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education)

tags: love
4 people liked it

"Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes."
— Craig M. Mullaney (The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education)

tags: cognition, dadt, military, philosophy, theology
3 people liked it

"Your heart I take in mine. Whatever is in your heart shall be in mine, whatever is in mine shall be in yours. Our hearts shall be one, our minds shall be one. May God make us one."
— Craig M. Mullaney (The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education)

tags: love
2 people liked it

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

174 people liked it

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