Quotes by Statesmen - Page 3

Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world.
Lord Chesterfield
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.
Sir Francis Bacon
It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea.
Seneca
The only really interesting thing iswhat happens between two people in a room.
Francis Bacon
The king reigns but does not govern.
Jan Zamoyski
...it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.
Seneca
There is no refuge from confession but suicide and suicide is confession.
Daniel Webster
Let us be brave in the face of adversity.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
I recommend you to take care of the minutes for the hours will take care of themselves.
Lord Chesterfield
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But one must know where one stands and where the others wish to go.
Goethe
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.
Francis Bacon
For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.
Francis Bacon
Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.
Edmund Burke
The cold neutrality of an impartial judge.
Edmund Burke
We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There was never law or sect or opinion did so much magnify goodness as the Christian religion doth.
Sir Francis Bacon
The road is long if one proceeds by way of precepts but short and effectual if by way of personal example.
Seneca
Morality in the general is well enough known by men, but the particular refinements of virtue are unknown by most persons; thus the majority of parents, without knowing it and without intending it, give very bad examples to their children.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
When a nation which has long groaned under the intolerable yoke of a tyrant rises at last and throws off its chains, do you call that weakness? The man who, to rescue his house from the flames, finds his physical strength redoubled, so that he lifts burdens with ease which in the absence of excitement he could scarcely move; he who under the rage of an insult attacks and puts to flight half a score of his enemies,—are such persons to be called weak? My good friend, if resistance be strength, how can the highest degree of resistance be a weakness?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Edmund Burke
We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
Philip Dormer Stanhope
I take all knowledge to be my province.
Sir Francis Bacon
What a great blessing is a friend with a heart so trusty you may safely bury all your secrets in it.
Seneca
…because it is natural to touch more often the parts that hurt.
Seneca
I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tombs of the Capulets.
Edmund Burke
To expel hunger and thirst there is no necessity of sitting in a palace and submitting to the supercilious brow and contumelious favour of the rich and great there is no necessity of sailing upon the deep or of following the camp What nature wants is every where to be found and attainable without much difficulty whereas require the sweat of the brow for these we are obliged to dress anew j compelled to grow old in the field and driven to foreign mores A sufficiency is always at hand
Seneca
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
Edmund Burke
How closely flattery resembles friendship! It not only apes friendship, but outdoes it, passing it in the race; with wide-open and indulgent ears it is welcomed and sinks to the depths of the heart, and it is pleasing precisely wherein it does harm.
Seneca
Ambassadors are the eye and ear of states.
Francesco Guicciardini
Talents are best nurtured in solitude: character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
Goethe
Those who wish their virtue to be advertised are not striving for virtue but for renown. Are you not willing to be just without being renowned? Nay, indeed you must often be just and be at the same time disgraced. And then, if you are wise, let ill repute, well won, be a delight. Farewell.
Seneca
Histories make men wise poets witty the mathematics subtile natural philosophy deep morals grave logic and rhetoric able to contend.
Sir Francis Bacon
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
Francis Bacon
There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives?
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him everybody sees them.
Goethe
Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.
Daniel Webster
Our true mentor in life is science.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
The king reigns but does not govern.
Otto von Bismarck
Never hold any one by the button or the hand in order to be heard out for if people are unwilling to hear you you had better hold your tongue than them.
Lord Chesterfield
Life is divided into three parts: what was, what is and what shall be. Of these three periods, the present is short, the future is doubtful and the past alone is certain.
Seneca
But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Nobody will keep the things he hears to himself, and nobody will repeat just what he hears and no more. Neither will anyone who has failed to keep a story to himself keep the name of his informant to himself. Every person without exception has someone to whom he confides everything that is confided to himself. Even supposing he puts some guard in his garrulous tongue and is content with a single pair of ears, he will still be the creator of a host of later listeners – such is the way in which what was but a little while before a secret becomes common rumor.
Seneca
I see that you have come to the last stage of human life; you are close upon your hundreth year, or even beyond: come now, hold an audit of your life. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money-lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing your slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Consider also the diseases which we have brought on ourselves, and the time too which has been unused. You will find that you have fewer years than you reckon. Call to mind when you ever had a fixed purpose; how few days have passed as you had planned; when you were ever at your own disposal; when your face wore its natural expression; when your mind was undisturbed; what work you have achieved in such a long life; how many have plundered your life when you were unaware of your losses; how much you have lost through groundless sorrow, foolish joy, greedy desire, the seductions of society; how little of your own was left to you. You will realize that you are dying prematurely.
Seneca
we deceive ourselves in thinking that death only follows life whereas it both goes before and will follow after it for where is the difference in not beginning or ceasing to exist the effect of both is not to be
Seneca
Courage leads starward fear toward death.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set on the contrary he who imitates what is good always falls short.
Francesco Guicciardini
One should count each day a separate life.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Pleasure is a reciprocal no one feels it who does not at the same time give it. To be pleased one must please.
Lord Chesterfield
One who's our friend is fond of us one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,And not in utter loneliness to live,Myself at last did to the Devil give!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.
Edmund Burke
It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.
Thomas More
No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire but my heart is all my own.
Goethe
Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
Seneca
The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.
Thomas More
A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca