“If at first you do succeed – try to hide your astonishment.” Harry F. Banks
“Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.”
John Henry Cardinal Newman
“When I tried to prove Murphy’s Law, something always went wrong.” Top 20 Internet Tag Lines in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 4 #8
“A man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.”
G.K. Chesterton
“What the people of that small island [England] have done during the past five hundred years has shaped the course of history in every corner of the world. Without a proper knowledge of the background of English history, you cannot understand what you read in the newspapers.”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind
“Even if it were true that a hundred persons would experience more pleasure from torturing one person than that person would experience pain (in some dreadful utilitarian calculus), such an action would be an abomination. The person is never subordinate to the common good in an instrumental way. Persons are not means but ends, because of the God in Whom they live and Who lives in them.”
Michael Novak Free Persons and the Common Good
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure ... but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.” Francis Chan (quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online along with many other excellent maxims)