Patrick Drake > Patrick's Quotes

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”
― Epictetus

“If you seek Truth, you will not seek to gain a victory by every possible means; and when you have found Truth, you need not fear being defeated.”
― Epictetus

“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
― Epictetus

“Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“CHAPTER VI
Concerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And Ability

LET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.”
― Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

“Carpe diem."

(Odes: I.11)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

“Too many kings can ruin an army”
― Homer

“It takes two flints to make a fire.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
― Plato, The Republic

“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“By seeking and blundering we learn.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations

“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti

“The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to men that are great-souled and free.”
― Aristotle, Politics

“When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
― Maya Angelou

“I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.”
― Plato, Euthyphro

“Creativity takes courage. ”
― Henri Matisse

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Ancora Imparo

(Yet I am learning)”
― Michelangelo

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.”
― Pythagoras