Respect

If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.

Blaise Pascal   (1623 – 1662)

French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist.

Quotations – Dorothy L. Sayers

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Dorothy L. Sayers   (1893 – 1957)

British writer.

Patience – Elizabeth Taylor

It is very strange…that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

Elizabeth Taylor   (1912 – 1975)

British novelist and short-story writer.

Opportunity – George Bernard Shaw

A man who never missed an occasion to let slip an opportunity.

Attributed to George Bernard Shaw   (1856 – 1950)

Irish playwright

Nature – William Wordsworth

A sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth   (1770 – 1850)

British poet.

Modesty – J. B. Priestley

A lot of men who have accepted—or had imposed upon them in boyhood—the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves. If they do not blow their own trumpets it is because they feel you are not fit to listen to the performance.

 J. B. Priestley   (1894 – 1984)

British writer.

Leadership – Sayyid Qutb

The leadership of western man in the human world is coming to an end, not because western civilization is materially bankrupt or has lost its economic or military strength, but because the Western order has played its part and no longer possesses that “stock” of “values” which give it its predominance.

 Sayyid Qutb   (1903? – 1966)

Egyptian philosopher and political leader.

Knowledge – Martin Buber

This knowledge…—that the world is a devastated house that must be restored for the spirit; and that so long as this remains unaccomplished, the spirit has no dwelling place—is Jesus’ most deep-seated Judaism.

 Martin Buber   (1878 – 1965)

Austrian-born Israeli philosopher of religion and Zionist.

Kindness – Vasily Grossman

A kindness outside any system of social or religious good…If we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal…extended to every living thing, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.

Vasily Grossman   (1905 – 1964)

Russian writer.

Joy – Xu Zhimo

Flow of joy from the source of Enlightenment, manifest now in this great, solemn calm of release, harmonious, limitless calm.

Xu Zhimo   (1895 – 1931)

Chinese poet.