Quotes by Statesmen - Page 2

Some books are to be tasted others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.
Sir Francis Bacon
We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke
A great step toward independence is a good-humoured stomach.
Seneca
It's easier to get philosophers to agree than clocks.
Seneca
[I]ndulge the body just so far as suffices for good health. It needs to be treated somewhat strictly to prevent it from being disobedient to the spirit. Your food should appease your hunger, your drink quench your thirst, your clothing keep out the cold, your house be a protection against inclement weather.
Seneca
Falsehoods not only disagree with truths but usually quarrel among themselves.
Daniel Webster
Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of civilization.
Daniel Webster
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.
Seneca
I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country, my God & Truth. I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American.
Daniel Webster
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
Daniel Webster
For the great benefits of our being- our life health and reason-we look upon ourselves.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
No man can live happily who regards himself alone who turns everything to his own advantage. Thou must live for another if thou wishest to live for thyself.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.
Francis Bacon
If it be a point of humanity for man to bring health and comfort to man, and especially to mitigate and assuage the grief of others, and by taking from them the sorrow and heaviness of life to restore them to joy, that is to say, to pleasure, why may it not then be said that nature does provoke every man to do the same to himself?
Thomas More
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Francis Bacon
But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.
Francis Bacon
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
Seneca
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
For greed all nature is too little.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
All things are like spring dreams, passing with no trace.
Su Tung-po
It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may
Daniel Webster
Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I love you, what business is it of yours?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
Lord Chesterfield
There is nothing so bitter that a patient mind cannot find some solace for it.
Seneca
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
Seneca
Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.
Thomas More
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.
Francis Bacon
He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
Edmund Burke
Night brings our troubles to the light rather than banishes them.
Seneca
Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him and that all merely exists for his sake.
Goethe
Revenge is an inhuman word.
Seneca
I would address one general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the Angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell, but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man come in danger by it.
Francis Bacon
if only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
distringit librorum multitudo (the abundance of books is distraction)
Seneca
It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.
Seneca
Colors are light's suffering and joy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar it never fails of doing justice upon itself for every guilty person is his own hangman.
Seneca
Never follow the crowd.
Bernard M. Baruch
Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.
Bernard M. Baruch
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Goethe
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit and not when they miss and commit to memory the one and forget and pass over the other.
Sir Francis Bacon
The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.
Seneca
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
What once were vices are now manners.
Seneca
[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.
Thomas More
Authority, without any condition and reservation, belongs to the nation.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon
Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.
Bernard M. Baruch
Fate rules the affairs of mankind with no recognizable order.
Seneca
Queen of arts and daughter of heaven.
Edmund Burke
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe