Diana Higgins > Diana's Quotes

“Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it, but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.”
― Charles Lindberg

“Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.”
― Warren Bennis

“Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity. You can only achieve happiness if you are too busy living your life to notice whether you are happy or not.”
― Frank Pittman

“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
― Plato, The Republic

“The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.”
― George Eliot

“People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.”
― Willa Cather

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
― Andre Gide

“Readers are of two sorts: one who goes carefully through a book, and the other who as carefully lets the book go through him. ”
― Douglas Jerrold

“Become simple and live simply, not only within yourself but also in your everyday dealings. Don’t make ripples all around you, don’t try to be interesting, keep your distance, be honest, fight the desire to be thought fascinating by the outside world.”
― Etty Hillesum

“A different language is a different vision of life.”
― Frederico Fellini

“Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.”
― Richard Whately

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.”
― Arthur Helps

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day. ”
― Thornton Wilder

“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
― Lorrie Moore

“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the reader's eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.”
― Bill Barich

“Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”
― Nadia Boulanger

“God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.”
― Thomas Huxley