Benjamin Franklin · 64 pages
Rating: (234 votes)
“I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe in that He ought to be whipped from pilar to post and back again for His shameful actions toward Humanity.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Doing an Injury puts you below your Enemy; Revenging one makes you but even with him; Forgiving it sets you above him.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“At 20 years of age the Will reigns; at 30 the Wit; at 40 the Judgment.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Discontented Minds, and Fevers of the Body are not to be cured by changing Beds or Businesses.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Coulda knocked me over with a feather, the front bell went and I opened the door to that tall drink of cool water. Woke up and I knew it was a good day. Felt it in my bones. Opened the door to him, glad I was right.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Raid
“It’s like … everything that happened to you, all those terrible things that I hope someday you’ll tell me about, they’re part of who you are now. They make up the scars that are on your heart. If you rip them off, try to make them disappear, you’ll just cause more damage in the end. Scars are your body’s way of healing, making that damaged part stronger than it ever was before the pain.”
― Elle Casey, quote from Don't Make Me Beautiful
“Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty. I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”
― William James, quote from The Varieties of Religious Experience
“...if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from Divisadero
“I needed him here like I needed a yeast infection.”
― Kathy Reichs, quote from Déjà Dead
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