31 Quotations I Love

I'm big on quotations. When I was 15, I started a Commonplace Book, at my mother's suggestion (hi, Mom!) in which is written witticisms, words of wisdom, and whole passages from a variety of sources - scientists, ministers, playwrights, actors, poets, writers, statesmen, and so on. They have shaped my young mind and life. I am now on Volume Two, having discovered so many interesting thoughts to record. Here are just 31. Enjoy!

1. A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. -Herm Albright  
2.  Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. -Albert Einstein
3. Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God. - Jim Elliot
4. The man who has ceased to learn ought not to be allowed to run around loose. - M.M. Coady
5. The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. - Mark Van Doren
6. Want to know the shortest route to ineffectiveness? Start running scared. -Charles Swindoll
7. Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft-living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. -Theodore Roosevelt
8. Don't create barriers for yourself or put limits on your aspirations - keep stretching and enlarging your mind so that you can envision participating in life in more exciting and meaningful ways. - Angela Lansbury
9. What hindereth thee more than thine affections not fully mortified to the will of God? - Thomas aKempis
10. He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God. - A. Kuyper
11. Man finds it hard to get what he wants because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best and man will not take it. -George MacDonald
12. How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these. - George Washington Carver 
13. Let early education be sort of amusement, you will then be better able to find out the natural bent. - Plato
14.  Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thoughts. -Elisabeth Elliot
15. This is my only comfort in life and in death: that I belong - body and soul - not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of His own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me. -Heidelberg Catechism
16. You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. -Jack London
17. Captive Greece took captive her rude captors. - Horace
18. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious; but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. - G.K. Chesterton.
19. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices. - Horace Mann
20. People are basically lazy. If you make it hard, they will give up. Then, bang! Oops! You lost your chance to communicate. - Judith Schmitt (my college English Professor)
21. Creativity does not truly come from the popularized image of the tormented artists, struggling with the muse. True creativity is born in community as men and women of God listen to each other and to Him, as we seek to understand each other's woundedness and strengths. - Michael Card.
22. Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the differences between what things are and what they should be. -William Hazlitt 
23. As a writer, an idea must first move you before you can hope that is will move anyone else. -Amy Grant
24. There is hardly a higher compliment you can pay an individual than helping him to be useful and to find satisfaction in his usefulness. - Donald Laird
25. To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved. - George MacDonald
26.  Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement,but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways. - H.Jackson Braun
27. Personally, I think if a woman hasn't met the right man by the time she's 24, she may be lucky. -Deborah Kerr
28. No quality is more attractive than poise - that deep sense of being at ease with yourself and the world. - Unknown
29. The kind of beauty is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity. - Ruby Dee
30. Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people hae is when they take a bite out of you.  Zig Ziglar
31. One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn't pay to get discouraged. - Lucille Ball.