Amit > Amit's Quotes

“Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.”
― Les Brown, Live Your Dreams

“You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.”
― Les Brown, The Power of Purpose

“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”
― Les Brown

“Align yourself with people that you can learn from, people who want more out of life, people who are stretching and searching and seeking some higher ground in life.”
― Les Brown

“Perfection does not exist -- you can always do better and you can always grow.”
― Les Brown

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
― Confucius

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
― Confucius

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
― Confucius, The Book of Rites

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The Seven Social Sins are:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.


From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.”
― Frederick Lewis Donaldson

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“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