Addiction

Addiction is the physical manifestation
of a dysfunctional mental thought form
stemming from discomfort in your emotional body.
-Michael Brown

All addictions are the result of self-abandonment.
-Almine Barton

Your addictions are those parts of yourself
that are most out of control.
Those are the parts of yourself
that lose power to external circumstances.
-Gary Zukav

The root is not the drinking,
but the desire to drink.
-Samuel Clemens, "Mark Twain"

Many addictions originate in feeding or soothing the body
when it is the soul which is aching.
-Caitlin Matthews

You are addicted to a feeling
that assists you in avoiding feeling something else.
-Michael Brown

Addiction is an attempt to control/sedate 
discomfort in the emotional body.
-Michael Brown

Not why the addiction,
but why the pain.
-Gabor Mate

People with addictive behaviors
are often intensely aware of the irreconcilable paradoxes of life,
and therefore feel existential pain most acutely.
-Deepak Chopra

In order to release your addiction,
it is necessary to enter your inadequacies,
to recognize they are real,
and to bring them into the light of consciousness to heal.
-Gary Zukav

Recognition of your own addictions requires inner work.
It requires that you look clearly
at the places where you lose power in your life,
where you are controlled by external circumstances.
It requires going through your defenses.
-Gary Zukav

Addictions are not to any particular "thing"
but to the state of mind
that the experience of the "thing" provides.
-Howard Falco

Find the metaphor that the addictive object represents
and bring that metaphor to consciousness.
-Marion Woodman

Move into how strong your addiction is,
and ask yourself if the time is really right
for you to release this form of learning.
-Gary Zukav

If your addiction lingers,
ask yourself if you really want to release it,
because in your heart you do not.
-Gary Zukav

What is more important to you,
your wholeness and your freedom,
or the pleasures that you get from satisfying your addiction?
-Gary Zukav

Aggression

Aggression is a blind impulse to self-affirmation,
to the expression of all elements of one's being,
without any discrimination of choice,
without any concern for consequences,
without any consideration for others.
-Roberto Assagioli

Aggression is not necessarily destructive at all.
It springs from an innate tendency to grow and master life
which seems to be characteristic of all living matter.
Only when this life force is obstructed in its development
do ingredients of rage, anger or hate become connected with it.
-Clara Thompson 

Aggression is different from anger.
Anger is an emotion; aggression is a behavior.
There are better ways to deal with anger than behaving aggressively.
Aggressive talk, gestures or behaviors belong to the old way of being.
Once we tune in to a higher level of consciousness,
aggression is as unnecessary as is the hand-held plow in modern day agriculture.
-Gwen Randall-Young

Anger

Anger broke the pane of glass between us.
-Nancy Friday

Anger is loaded
with information and energy.
-Audre Lorde

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
-Henry Ward Beecher
 
The root of anger
is an unhappy frame of mind.
-Georgia Nicols
 
Anger is really disappointed hope.
-Erica Jong
 
Anger always comes from frustrated expectations.
-Elliott Larson

Anger always has fear underneath it.
-Carleton Whitehead

The only antidote to anger
is to eliminate the internal sentence,
"If only you were more like me."
-Wayne Dyer

All anger is a denial of projection.
-Hugh Prather
 
Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.
-William Braxton Irvine

All men of anger are men of pride.
-Midrash Rabbah
 
Anger is a short madness.
-Horace
 
For very minute you remain angry,
you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
When anger threatens reason,
wait while the storm runs its course
before venturing forth.
-Zen Saying
 
Anger locks a person in his own house.
-Noah ben Sheah
 
When anger arises
think of the consequences.
-Confucius
 
How much more grievous
are the consequences of anger
than the causes of it.
-Marcus Aurelius
 
Anger is an acid that can do more harm
to the vessel in which it is stored
than to anything in which it is poured.
-Mark Twain
 
Every time you get angry
you poison your own system.
-Alfred A. Montapert
 
Beware of him that is slow to anger;
anger, when it is long in coming,
is the stronger when it comes, and longer kept.
-Francis Quarles
 
So long as a man is angry,
he cannot be in the right.
-Chinese proverb
 
A man can't be angry at his own time
without suffering some damage.
-Robert Musil
 
There is not good cause for anger to another
-The Oculatum
 
What most increases anger
is the feeling that one is in the wrong.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
 
Anger may be foolish and absurd,
and one may be irritated when in the wrong;
but a man never feels outraged
unless in some respect he is at bottom right.
-Victor Hugo

If anyone is capable of angering you,
this person becomes your master.
-Epictetus
 
All anger is nothing more than attempt
to make someone feel guilty.
-A Course in Miracles
 
If the person does not change,
detach yourself calmly from him or her
and abandon your anger.
Whatever you do, do not get absorbed in it.
-Mother Meera
 
Patience is the antidote to anger.
-Georgia Nicols

In anger we should refrain
both from speech and action.
-Pythagoras
 
When angry, count ten before you speak;
if very angry, an hundred.
-Thomas Jefferson
 
I have learned through bitter experience that one supreme lesson:
to conserve my anger,
and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy,
even so our anger controlled
can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
-Mohandas Gandhi
 
To rule one's anger is well;
to prevent it is better.
-Tyron Edwards

Apathy

Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.
-Horace Greely
 
Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm,
and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things:
first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storms
and second, a definite intelligible plan
for carrying that ideal into practice.
-Anonymous

Arguments

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
-Robert Benchley

One argues because one is confused.
The man who knows does not argue;
the man who argues does not know.
-Lin Yutang
 
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
-Jonathan Swift
 
People do not always argue
because they misunderstand one another;
they argue because they hold different goals.
-William H. Whyte
 
Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love!
Hearts that the world in vain has tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
that stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fell off.
-Thomas Moore
 
Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both.
-William Cowper
 
Argument only increases argument.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home
but should not carry about with him.
-Samuel Butler
 
Contention is like fire,
for both burn as long as there is any exhaustible matter
to contend with.
-Thomas Adams
 
Two men in a burning house
must not stop to argue.
-African Proverb
 
The first duty of a wise advocate
is to convince his opponents
that he understands their arguments,
and sympathizes with their just feelings.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image -
some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball,
which they can see and handle and carry home with them -
and the cause is half won.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
You musn't exaggerate, young man.
That's always a sign that your argument is weak.
-Bertrand Russell
 
He who imposes his argument by bravado and command
shows that he is weak in reason.
-Michel de Montaigne
 
For gentle ways are best, and keep aloof
From sharp contentions.
-Homer
 
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
-Josh Billings
 
Argument seldom convinces anyone
contrary to his inclinations.
-Thomas Fuller

Abstain from argument:
you cannot truly convince anyone of anything.
Opinions are like nails:
the more you hammer them, the deeper they go.
-Juvenal
 
One can never come to the truth through argument,
when the whole urge behind the argument
is to establish one's case,
to assert one's viewpoint and make it prevail.
-Nilakantha Sri Ram
 
People's minds are changed through observation
and not through argument.
-Will Rogers
 
To prove yourself right
is just another way to prove someone else wrong.
-Anonymous
 
Never argue;
repeat your assertion.
-Robert Owen

Repetition is a convincing argument.
Shad Helmstetter
 
To strive with an equal is dangerous;
with a superior, mad;
with an inferior, degrading.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
 
When you argue with your inferiors,
you convince them of only one thing:
they are as clever as you.
 -Irving Layton

Don't argue with an idiot;
people watching may not be able to tell the difference.
-Anonymous

Fear not those who argue
but those who dodge.
-Marie von Ebner Eschenbach

When two good people argue over principles,
they are both right.
--Marie von Ebner Eschenbach
 
There is no good arguing with the inevitable.
The only argument available with an east wind
is to put on your overcoat.
-James Lowell
 
Argue with anything else,
but don't argue with your own nature.
-Philip Pullman

Arguments are like eels: 
however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp 
unless fixed there by imagery and style.
Alain de Botton 
 
It is no use arguing
and saying this is the truth;
you have to be the truth.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Arrogance

When men are most sure and arrogant
they are commonly most mistaken.
-David Hume
 
The demand to be loved
is the greatest of all arrogant assumptions.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Blame

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming,
which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
-Lionel Trilling

Blame implies fault - 
a very negative way to characterize responsibility.
-Mike Dooley

There is man in his entirety,
blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.
-Samuel Beckett
 
Blame others and you curse yourself
-The Oculatum

That which we understand we can't blame.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
All blame is a waste of time.
No matter how much fault you find with another,
and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you.
The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you
when you are looking for external reasons
to explain your unhappiness or frustration.
You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him,
but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you
that is making you unhappy.
-Wayne Dyer

Boastfulness

The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
-William Shakespeare
 
The firecracker cries aloud,
"I am the light!"
and is finished in a moment.
The diamond, shining its light constantly,
never says a word about its light.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Tell me what you boast of
and I will tell you what you lack.
-Anonymous
 
There is this much benefit in brag,
that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal.
Humor him by all means;
draw it all out, and hold him to it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
When boasting ends,
there dignity begins.
-Edward Young 

Boredom

Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

I am bored to death with it.
Bored to death with this place,
bored to death with my life,
bored to death with myself.
-Charles Dickens
 
Somebody's boring me.
I think it's me.
-Dylan Thomas
 
All boredom has to do with
disconnection from the self.
-Chris Griscom
 
Boredom expresses the subjective emptiness of inner ambivalence
that does not permit any emotion to come to the surface.
-Joost A. M. Meerloo
 
A desire for desires - boredom
-Leo Tolstoy

Boredom is your imagination calling you.
-Brene Brown
 
You'll find boredom
where there is the absence of a good idea.
-Earl Nightingale
 
There is no reason why you should be bored
when you can be otherwise.
-Emily Post
 
I am never bored anywhere:
being bored is an insult to oneself.
-Jules Renard
 
Is not life a hundred times too short
for us to bore ourselves?
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Censure

The readiest and surest way to get ride of censure
is to correct ourselves.
-Demosthenes
 
All correction
beings and end in me.
-A Course in Miracles

Conditions

The only thing that identifies you
with a painful condition is thought.
-Kenneth G. Mills
 
There is nothing wrong with a thought
as long as you know it's a thought.
The difficulty lies when you have a thought
and don't recognize it as a thought;
you call it your condition.
-Kenneth G. Mills
 
Psychologically painful conditions
lead to physically painful conditions later.
-Shaun de Warren
 
It is attachment to the condition
that allows its presence.
-Shaun de Warren
 
There is only one thing
that helps us to rise above conditions,
and that is a change of outlook on life.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Conflict

Conflict is the result of short-range thinking.
-William Douglas Horden

Conflict is the denial of what is
or the running away from what it;
there is no conflict other than that.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
 
Conflict arises when your personal ideas
conflict with what is universally true.
-Rebecca Clark

Those who become accustomed to conflict
believe they attack others out of self-defense.
-William Douglas Horden

No one wins a conflict
unless both feel understood and enlightened
about the theme or nature of the others.
-Arnold Mindell
 
The most dramatic conflicts are perhaps,
those that take place not between me
but between man and himself -
where the arena of conflict is a solitary mind.
-Clark Moustakas
 
Why don't you want to do what you know you should do?
The reason you don't is that you are in conflict with yourself.
-Tom Hopkins

Minimize or eliminate thoughts
which cause inner conflict.
-David A. Cooper
 
When the movement in the direction
of becoming something other than what you are
isn't there any more,
you are not in conflict with yourself.
-U. G. Krishnamurti

Criticism

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
-H. L. Mencken
 
Criticism is the art of appraising others
at one's own value.
-George Jean Nathan
 
When we condemn other people,
we generally indirectly mean to flatter ourselves.
-John S. Blackie
 
Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
-Emmet Fox
 
The condemnation of an error is another error.
-Antonio Porchia
 
Perfect integrity is not critical of others.
-Chuang-tzu
 
Criticizing another's garden
doesn't keep the weeds out of your own.
-Italian Proverb
 
Criticism often takes from the tree
caterpillars and blossoms together.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
 
The pain of hearing a criticism
is largely due to its accuracy.
-Harville Hendrix
 
It is a barren kind of criticism
which tells you what a thing is not.
-Rufus Wilmot Griswold
 
Criticism, like rain,
should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth
without destroying his roots.
-Frank A. Clark
 
Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish,
wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award -
these are the true aims and duties of criticism.
-William Gilmore Simms
 
I am bound by my own definition of criticism:
a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate
the best that is known and thought in the world.
-Matthew Arnold

Cynicism

Cynicism is an unpleasant way
of saying the truth.
-Lillian Hellman
 
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man,
and never fails to see a bad one.
-Henry Ward Beecher
 
A cynic can chill and dishearten
with a single word.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
Cynicism is intellectual treason.
-Norman Cousins
 
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
-Joyce Carol Oates
 
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past,
he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
-Sydney J. Harris

Cynics are - beneath it all - 
only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
-Alain de Botton 
 
Inside every cynical person,
there is a disappointed idealist.
-George Carlin
 
Scratch a cynic
and underneath, as often as not,
you'll find a dead idealist.
-Joseph Epstein
 
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently
among the most highly educated young men and women of the West,
results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
-Bertrand Russell
 
Never, never, never be a cynic, even a gentle one.
Never help out a sneer, even at the devil.
-Vachel Lindsay
 
It takes a clever man to turn cynic
and a wise man to be clever enough not to.
-Fannie Hurst

Defensiveness

When you feel the need arise
to be defensive about anything,
you have identified yourself with an illusion.
-A Course in Miracles
 
What we pretend to be defending as the "truth"
is really our own self-esteem.
-Thomas Merton 

Denial

Denial is a common tactic
that substitutes deliberate ignorance
for thoughtful planning.
-Charles Tremper
 
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
-C. Northcote Parkinson
 
A man must not deny his manifest abilities,
for that is to evade his obligations.
-William Feather
 
I would be a fool
to deny my own abilities.
-Julie Andrews
 
What could begin to deny self,
if there were not something in man different from self?
-William Law
 
All the different powers and qualities
that we need to exist in life are attainable
if we do not deny their existence in ourselves,
but when we deny that they exist in us,
then naturally life will deprive us of that gift which is our own.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan 

Depression

Depression is frozen feeling.
-Jeff Brown
 
Depression occurs when you catch sight
of the looming emptiness of your life.
-Rebecca Clark
 
Depression is the inability
to construct a future.
-Rollo May
 
Depression is a result of feeling powerless - 
powerless to change your circumstances 
and feeling trapped by your life.
-Mike Dooley
 
To some degree
depression is a function of unconscious anger.
-Steve Hovland
 
Depression is rage spread thin.
-George Santayana
 
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances,
I have one more intimate contact.
My depression is the most faithful mistress I have ever known -
no wonder, then, that I return the love.
-Soren Kirkegaard

The quickest way to get rid of your depression hound
is to buy and tame a gratitude lamb.
-Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, "Sri Chinmoy"
 
Always look for what is good in you.
Concentrate all your attention on this good part of yourself,
show it in the full light of day,
and transform depression into the joy of being.
-Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

Devilishness

'Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil.
-William Shakespeare
 
The devil's boots don't creak.
-Scottish Proverb
 
The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.
-William Shakespeare
 
The devil's voice is sweet to hear.
-Stephen King
 
Gossip is the devil's radio.
-George Harrison
 
Talk of the devil,
and he is bound to appear.
-Proverb
 
The devil is not as black as he is painted.
-Dante Alighieri
 
The devil's most devilish
when respectable.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 
The devil hides behind the cross.
-Spanish Proverb
 
The cleverist trick of the Devil
is to convince us that he does not exist.
-Charles Baudelaire
 
Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect
when we meet them face to face.
-Nelson DeMille
 
An idle brain
is the devil's workshop.
-English Proverb
 
The devil' s name is dullness.
-Robert E. Lee
 
The devil is the giddiness of the intelligence
stupefied by the irresolution of the heart.
It is a monomania of nothingness, the lure of the abyss.
-Eliphas Levi

The devil is the doubter in you.
-Neville Goddard
 
The devil is compromise.
-Henrik Ibsen
 
The devil is nothing but that part of you
that supports alternatives.
-Kenneth G. Mills
 
If you hast not seen the devil,
look at thine own self.
-Djalal ad-Din Rumi
 
The more devils we have within us,
the more chance we have to form angels.
 -Nikos Kazantzakis
 
The devil, unfortunately, is not vanquished by being told to go away;
it is the light of consciousness that he cannot endure.
-Liz Greene
 
When you put the devil out
make sure he takes his bags.
-Anonymous 

Difficulties

For want of self-restraint,
many men are engaged all their lives
in fighting with difficulties of their own making.
-Samuel Smiles

The difficulties of character persist
so long as one yields to them when they arise.
-Aurobindo Ghose

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles,
but the grace to transform them.
-Simone de Weil

The difficulties that come to you are exactly in proportion to your strength -
nothing can happen to you that does not belong to your consciousness,
and all that belongs to your consciousness you are able to master.
-Mirra Alfassa, "The Mother"

The degree of difficulty in fulfillment
is directly proportionate to the degree of needed regeneracy;
degree of ease in fulfillment is directly proportionate to degree
of consciously-attained equilibrium.
-Elman Bacher

Difficulties! Difficulties!
What are they, my Sisters?
They are merely children's playthings,
exaggerated by the imagination of a person
who is not yet accustomed to trusting entirely the infinite power of God.
-Mother Frances Cabrini

Disappointment

Disappointment is unmet expectations.
The more significant the expectations, 
the more significant the disappointment.
-Brene Brown

Doubt

Doubt, it seems to me,
is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
-Salman Rushdie
 
Doubt is the opposite of belief.
-Christian Bovee
 
Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass
before they enter the temple of wisdom.
-Charles Caleb Colton
 
Doubt must be no more than vigilance,
otherwise it can become dangerous.
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
 
When seeds of doubt are planted, don’t water them.
-Anonymous
 
Doubt is like a little germ
which gets lodged in the heart
and infects the whole being.
-Paramananda
 
Doubt is the mind's persistent assailant.
-Aurobindo Ghose
 
My mind was full
of the misty fumes of doubt.
-Zora Neale Hurston
 
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know
that faith is his twin brother.
-Kahlil Gibran
 
The supreme fall of falls is this,
the first doubt of one's self.
-Catharine Boissier, Comtesse de Gasparin

In the end, doubt doubts doubt
-William Douglas Horden
 
If you doubt yourself,
then indeed, you stand on shaky ground.
-Henrik Ibsen
 
But above all,
do not make yourself important by doubting.
-Soren Kierkegaard
 
Our doubts are our traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.
-William Shakespeare
 
To leap across an abyss,
one is better served by faith than doubt.
-William James
 
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.
-Alfred Tennyson
 
If the Sun and Moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.
-William Blake
 
When you doubt, abstain.
-Zoroaster
 
Doubt, indulged and cherished,
is in danger of becoming denial;
but if honest and bent on thorough investigation,
it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.
-Tyron Edwards
 
One must verify or expel his doubts,
and convert them into the certainty of Yes of No.
-Thomas Carlyle
 
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow
will be our doubts of today.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
 
If we are ever in doubt about what to do,
it is a good rule to ask ourselves
what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done.
-John Lubbock

Doubt is the only thing that gets in the way
of anything and everything being possible.
-Jack Lee Rosenberg

In the end, doubt doubts doubt.
-William Douglas Horden

Egotism

The personal pronoun "I,"
might well be the coat of arms of some individuals.
-Antoine Rivarol
 
The personal ego, until it has been tamed,
is always saying,
'Look at me,' or perhaps, 'Don't look at me'.
-Ann Mortifee
 
Egotists cannot converse,
they talk to themselves only.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
 
Self-love, so sensitive to its own cause,
has rarely any sympathy to spare for others.
-Germaine de Stael
 
Nothing so Empty
as those who are Full of themselves.
-Benjamin Whichcote
 
A person wrapped up in himself
makes a small package.
-Harry Emerson Fosdick
 
Egoism is the self-arrogating principle
in man.
-Sivananda
 
The ego tends to manifest
as a powerful urge to be right.
-Derek Lin
 
Ego is a slippery fellow,
intent on survival at all costs.
-Lama Surya Das
 
Egoism is harder than granite or steel.
-Sivananda
 
I own and operate a ferocious ego.
-Bill Moyers
 
Human egotism is hell on earth.
-Vernon Howard
 
It is the ego that has a jarring effect
upon life.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Ego is disharmony.
-Wayne Dyer
 
All unhappiness is due to ego.
-Mother Meera
 
Ego and karma are one and the same thing.
-David R. Hawkins
 
Man's worst enemy is his ego, his own ego.
When it is not in his control
man's thought, speech and action
are bent towards  the gratification of his ego.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
There's not much difference
between an inflated I
and an inflated other.
-Stephen Mitchell
 
Only the ego resists egos.
The spirit may notice egos,
but sees beyond them
and does not engage with them.
-Alan Cohen

Ego is a drama queen that loves to wrestle with difficulties.
-Andrew Dolecek
 
Why give the ego more power
by resisting and opposing it?
-David R. Hawkins

Only your allegiance it it
gives the ego any power over you.
-A Course in Miracles
 
It's hard to fight the enemy
when it has outposts in your head.
-Sally Kempton
 
I have never met a man
who gives me as much trouble as myself.
-Dwight Moody
 
The ego is a false self
born out of fear and defensiveness.
-John O'Donohue
 
Nothing is so weak
as an egotist.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
Egotism is the source and summary
of all faults and miseries.
-Thomas Carlyle
 
Ego maintains itself in creating conflict
between the opposites within.
-Richard and Iona Miller
 
The ego lives in the tension
between what you are and what you want to be.
-Chandra Mohan Jain, "Osho"
 
Where egoism exist,
thou are not experienced.
-Adi Granth
 
Controlling the ego is very difficult
because the ego occurs automatically,
before our reflective powers can manifest.
-David Frawley
 
The eradication of egoism
in all it numerous aggressive forms
comprises the very core of spirituality.
-Sivananda
 
The ego cannot thrive unless it is given food to feed on.
Remember this: don't ever let any food be given to it,
either by yourself or by others.
-Ashokananda
 
Check your egos at the door.
-Quincy Jones
 
Polish the ego's rust
from the mirror of your mind.
-Fakhr al-Din Iraqi

Truly, nothing weighs on the ego
but that which is true.
-Ibn Ata'illah
 
Make your ego porous.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
 
The greater the person,
the finer the ego.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
When one is concerned with one's ego
one is a small as that little particle that it is.
-Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
 
You may have reduced or thinned out your egoism to a very great extent
but if you are still susceptible to censure and praise,
know that the subtle egoism is still lurking in you.
-Sivananda
 
Humility is the control of egotism.
-Deng Ming-Dao

Put your mind on God
and the ego will take care of itself
[that is, it will dissolve.]
-Anasuya Devi
 
Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.
-Chogyam Trungpa
 
The island ego joined her continent.
-Aurobindo Ghose

Envy

Envy occurs when we want something 
that another person has.
-Brene Brown

All envy is proportionate to desire;
we are uneasy at the attainments of another.
-Samuel Johnson

Envy is simply being angry 
at being left out of the happiness of others.
-Hans Ulrick-Rieker

Envy requires keeping your eyes off yourself
and focused on others.
-Melvyn Kinder

Nothing sharpens sight like envy.
-Thomas Fuller

Envy has a thousand eyes,
but none with correct vision.
-Issachar Hurwitz

When yellow wants to be blue,
it becomes green.
-Russian Proverb

The truest mark of being born with great qualities
is being born without envy.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Errors, Mistakes

Mistakes are darkness.
-Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, "Sri Chinmoy"

Error is a hardy plant:
It flourisheth in every soil.
-Martin Farquhar Tupper
 
All the mistakes I ever made
were when I wanted to say "No" and said 'Yes'.
-Moss Hart
 
Reason often makes mistakes
but conscience never does.
-Josh Billings
 
Mistakes are not physical wounds,
but we immediately feel their pain.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter

A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
-Paulo Coelho
 
Mistakes are often painful when they happen,
but years later they are called experience.
-Denis Waitley
 
Experience is the name
everyone gives to their mistakes.
-Oscar Wilde

Do not fear mistakes.
There are none.
-Miles Davis
 
There are no mistakes.
The events we bring upon ourselves,
no matter how unpleasant,
are necessary to learn what we need to learn;
whatever steps we take,
they're necessary to reach the places we have chosen to go.
-Richard Bach
 
There are no mistakes
except the ones you do not learn from.
-Lyn Birkbeck
 
There are no mistakes, save one:
the failure to learn from a mistake.
-Robert Fripp

Error is not sanctified by age.
-George W. Carey
 
Mistakes help one retain humility.
-David R. Hawkins
 
Don't be embarrassed by your mistakes.
Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them.
This is one of the best ways of self-education.
-Leo Tolstoy

Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures
as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression.
Do not repeat them in the future.
-Sivananda
 
Mistakes are the usual bridge
between inexperience and wisdom.
-Phyllis Theroux
 
A mistake is a loop in consciousness
made to expose a greater surface to experience.
-Alice O. Howell
 
Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
-James Joyce
 
Mistakes are inevitable;
don't invalidate yourself for making them.
-Theo Cade

Today's mistakes are only for today.
Tomorrow we shall admit them.
The day after tomorrow, we shall not repeat them.
-Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, "Sri Chinmoy"
 
Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow 
is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?
-Lucy Maud Montgomery

Escapism

The undecided heart searches for an escape.
-Andy Andrews
 
Hiding places are innumerable,
escape is only one,
but possibilities of escape, again,
are as many as hiding places.
-Franz Kafka
 
We each devise our means of escape
from the intolerable.
-William Styron
 
Gluttony is an emotional escape,
a sign something is eating us.
-Peter de Vries
 
We feel free when we escape -
even if it be from the frying pan into the fire.
-Eric Hoffer
 
A fine tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life
into the world of objective perception and thought.
-Albert Einstein
 
The only way to escape the abyss
is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out
and then descend into it.
-Cesare Pavese
 
The past is our definition.
We may strive, with good reason,
to escape it, or to escape the bad in it,
but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
-Wendell Berry
 
A person in danger should not try to escape all at one stroke.
He should first calmly hold his own,
then be satisfied with small gains,
which will come by creative adaptations.
-I Ching

Evil

Evil, in so far as it exists,
is the affirmation of disorder.
-Eliphas Levi

For nothing is evil in the beginning.
-J. R. R. Tolkien

Evil is wrought by want of thought 
as well as want of heart!
-Thomas Hood
 
Evil is the denial of reason in the philosophical world.
It is the denial of responsibility in the social world.
it is opposition to the inviolable laws of nature in the physical world.
-Eliphas Levi

The evil of our time
is the loss of consciousness of evil.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
 
Evil comes from the abuse of free will.
-C. S. Lewis

Evil is nothing more than being in a state of unconsciousness,
of being asleep.
-Vernon Howard
 
Evil needs to be understood for what it is:
the dynamic of the absence of Light.
-Gary Zukav
 
Evil is like a shadow.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Evil is a negative, not a positive term.
It denotes the absence rather than the presence of something.
It is the perceived privation of good,
the shadow where the light ought to be.
'The devil is a vacuum.'
-R. J. Campbell

Evil is a shadow, the foil of good.
-Eliphas Levi
 
Evil is good or truth misplaced.
-Mohandas Gandhi

The evil is null, is naught,
is silence implying sound.
-Robert Browning
 
Evils are only evils
in relation to a certain thing,
-Maimonides
 
Evil will arise whenever the outward manifestations of life
come to be valued more than its central essence.
-Martin Goldsmith
 
If evil has any reality, this is … its definition:
complete identification with form -
physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.
This results in a total unawareness of [our] connectedness with the whole,
[our] intrinsic oneness with every “other” 
as well as with the Source.
-Eckhart Tolle
 
He who seeks the origin of evil, seeks the source of what is not.
Evil is the disordered appetite of good,
the unfruitful attempt of an unskilful will.
-Eliphas Levi
 
The evil of the world is made possible
by nothing but the sanction you give it.
-Ayn Rand
 
The central defect of evil is not the sin
but the refusal to acknowledge it.
-M. Scott Peck
 
Evil has as much power as is given to it.
-Gernot Candolini
 
Evil is a hill.
Everyone gets on his own and talks about someone else's.
-African Proverb
 
According to Native American wisdom,
the only way evil can penetrate the human heart
is through the door of fear.
-Matthew Fox
 
In the degree that we hold a person in thought of evil or in error,
do we suggest evil and error to him...
and so in this way we may be sharers in the very evil-doing
in which we hold another in thought.
-Ralph Waldo Trine
 
Evil is sometimes like a tool in the hand;
recognized or unrecognized,
it lets itself be laid aside without protest if one so wills.
-Franz Kafka
 
The great epochs of life come
when we gain the courage to re-christen our evil
as what is best in us.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Three hundred poems
come to one thing:
"Think no evil!"
-A Zen Garden
 
Neither fight evil nor embrace it;
simply rise above it.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan 

Excuses

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature
should study people's excuses.
-Friedrich Hebbel
 
If you really want to do something, you'll find a way.
If you don't, you'll find an excuse.
-Jim  Rohn
 
If you don't want to do something,
one excuse is as good as another.
-Yiddish Proverb
 
It is easier to do a job right
than to explain why you didn't.
-Martin Van Buren
 
Don't do what you
will have to find an excuse for.
-Proverb
 
And oftentimes excusing of a fault
doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.
-William Shakespeare
 
Never ruin an apology
with an excuse.
-Benjamin Franklin
 
Don't make excuses.
Make something incredible happen in your life right now.
-Greg Hickman

Failure

There is no such thing as failure.
There are only results.
-Tony Robbins
 
There are no failure -
just experiences and your reactions to them.
-Jim Krause
 
Failures are like skinned knees -
painful but superficial.
- H. Ross Perot
 
Every failure
follows a weakness somewhere.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Failure is simply a few errors in judgement,
repeated every day.
-Jim Rohn
 
Failure means there has been a lack of self-control,
whether it is a failure in affairs or in health.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Failure means a stripping away
of the inessential.
-J. K. Rowling
 
A failure establishes only this,
that our determination to succeed
was not strong enough.
-Christian Bovee
 
The surest way to fail
is not to determine to succeed.
-Richard Sheridan
 
The great question is not whether you have failed,
but whether you are content with failure.
-Laurence J. Peter
 
Failure is a success
if we learn from it.
-Malcolm Forbes
 
Failure always brings something valuable with it.
I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
-Scott Adams
 
Failure is often the turning point,
the pivot of circumstance that swings us to higher levels.
-William George Jordan
 
The season of failure
is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.
-Yogananda
 
Only those who dare to fail greatly
can ever achieve greatly.
-Robert Kennedy
 
If you're not failing every now and again,
you're not doing anything very innovative.
-Woody Allen
 
If one does not fail at times,
then one has not challenged himself.
-Ferdinand Porsche
 
Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
-Samuel Beckett
 
A failure is not always a mistake,
it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances.
The real mistake is to stop trying.
-B. F. Skinner
 
The thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down,
but the staying down.
-Mary Pickford
 
Failure is only the opportunity
to begin again more intelligently.
-Henry Ford
 
Failure is just a condiment
that gives success its flavor.
-Truman Capote
 
Remember that failure is an event
not a person.
-Zig Ziglar
 
Failure is a detour,
not a dead-end street.
-Zig Ziglar
 
Make failure your teacher,
not your undertaker.
-Zig Ziglar
 
If you are doing your best,
you will not have to worry about failure.
-Robert S. Hillyer
 
The fear of failure produced more failure
than all other causes combined.
-Christian Larson
 
There is but one cause of human failure.
And that is man's lack of faith in his true self.
-William James
 
The only real failure in life
is not to be true to the best one knows.
-Frederick William Farrar
 
The saddest failures in life
are those that come from not putting forth
the power and will to succeed.
-Edwin Whipple

Half the failures in life arise
from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping.
-Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare
 
Believe and act
as if it were impossible to fail.
-Charles Kettering
 
Failure is not an option.
Everyone has to succeed.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger
 
In a total work, 
the failures have their not unimportant place.
-May Sarton

Fault-Finding

Nowadays people are born to find fault.
When they look at Achilles, they see only his heel.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
 
I will tell you one thing -
if you want peace of mind,
do not find fault with others.
-Sarada Devi
 
Finding fault in others, developing skill
at discovering weaknesses and inconsistency in others,
will begin to eat into your peace of mind.
If you keep it up forever,
you will eventually rob you of all the joys of life.
-James Magnan
 
To find fault with others
creates obstacles for everyone all around:
for him who criticizes, for him who is blamed,
as well as for those who listen to the criticism.
Whereas, what is said in a spirit of appreciation
is fruitful for everybody.
-Anandamayi Ma
 
To constantly remind a person of his faults
is to cause him to become more keenly conscious of those faults.
He will think more and more about his faults,
and will thereby cause his faults to become
more prominent and troublesome than they ever were before.
-Christian Larson
 
To find fault never pays;
it only brings enmity, discord and criticisms;
besides the faults we constantly see in others
will develop in ourselves.
-Christian Larson
 
Everyone has a side which can be criticized and wants repairing.
When one looks at that side,
one accumulates impressions which make one more and more imperfect
because they collect imperfection; and then that becomes one's world.
And when the mind has become a sponge full of undesirable impressions,
then what is emitted from it is undesirable also.
No one can speak ill of another without making it his own.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
If you look for the bad in people,
you will surely find it.
-Abraham Lincoln
 
There are no end of faults
in a human being.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Nothing so needs reforming
as other people's habits.
-Samuel Clemens, "Mark Twain"
 
Everyone is eagle-eyed
to see another's faults and deformity.
-John Dryden
 
One sees qualities at a distance
and defects at close range.
-Victor Hugo
 
We are never more discontented with others
than when we are discontented with ourselves.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
 
They know not their own defects
who search for the defects of others.
-Sanskrit Proverb
 
Man sees in another
his own fault.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
The more one understands oneself,
the more one finds that everything one finds lacking in others
is also lacking in oneself.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Seeing others faults
Means that one's own faults are strengthened.
-Seng-ts'an
 
Man sees the right side of his own mind
and the wrong side of another's.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
The faults of others console us in our own.
-Paul Eldridge
 
If we were faultless
we should not be so much annoyed
by the defects of those with whom we associate.
-Francois Fenelon
 
If we had no faults
we should not take so much pleasure
in noting those of others.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld
 
He that fancies himself very enlightened
because he sees the deficiencies in others,
may be very ignorant,
because he has not studied his own.
-Edward Bulwer-Lytton
 
Faults, mustard seed small, of others, you see well;
your own, as large as a melon, you see not.
-Mahabharata
 
The disease of men is this:
that they neglect their own field,
and go weed the fields of others,
and what they require from others is great,
while what they lay upon themselves is light.
-Mencius
 
In a general and almost absolute way
anything that shocks you in other people
is the very thing you carry in yourself
in a more or less veiled, more or less hidden form,
though perhaps in a slightly different guise
which allows you to delude yourself.
And what in yourself seems inoffensive enough,
becomes monstrous as soon as you see it in others.
-Mirra Alfassa, "The Mother"
 
How long will others' faults distract your mind
Your own accuse you, but your heart is blind...

When someone else's failings are defined
What hairs you split - but to your own you're blind!...

If you search for love and persevere
The sins of other men would disappear.
-Farid ud-Din Attar
 
When you are offended at any man's faults,
turn to yourself and study your own failings.
Then you will forget you anger.
-Epictetus
 
It is far better to know our weaknesses and failings
than to point out those of others.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
 
Let us look at our own shortcomings
and leave others people's alone.
-Teresa of Aivila
 
Bear with the faults  and frailties of others,
for you, too, have many faults which others have to bear.
-Thomas a Kempis
 
Remember, it is good for you to bear those around you,
because they also bear you.
-Samuel Johnson
 
By accusing another of his fault
you only root him more firmly in it.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Always remember that a person
that you find fault with a great deal,
will finally rebel.
-E. W. Howe
 
Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery
in which to bury the faults of his friends.
-Henry Ward Beecher
 
It is much easier to find a fault
than to overlook a fault.
-Anonymous
 
What keeps man from forgiving his fellow man
is that he holds the fault of another
constantly before his view.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
If you are pleased at finding faults,
you are displeased at finding perfections.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
 
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect.
The more perfect we are,
the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
-Francis Fenelon

I look only to the good qualities of men.
Not being faultless myself,
I won't presume to probe into the faults of others.
-Mohandas Gandhi

Faultfinding is a fault 
that should be found by the faultfinder.
-A. S. Vickers
 
Find fault when you must find fault in private,
and if possible sometime after the offense,
rather than at the time.
-Sydney Smith

Rare is the person
who can weigh the faults of others
without putting his thumb on the scales.
-Byron J. Langenfield
 
Even with God one can find fault.
But where is the fault?
In the person who finds it.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
If we close our eyes to the defects of our neighbour,
and only consider his good qualities,
we shall find good and benevolence everywhere.
The most perverse man has a good side to him,
and softens when one knows how to take him.
If you had nothing in common with the vices of men,
you would not even perceive them.
-Eliphas Levi
 
Love in the making sees faults;
love in the fulfillment sees none.
-Papa Ramdas
 
Faults are beauties in a lover's eye.
-Theocritus
 
They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them one by one;
I laughed aloud when they were done,
I knew them all so well before, -
Oh, they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.
-Sara Teasdale
 
When we see the reason behind every fault
that appears to us in anyone we meet in our life,
we become more tolerant, we become more forgiving.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
We are now living in a new age.
It is no longer good form to find fault with anything.
-Christian Larson

I vow not to talk about
the faults of others.
-Thubten Chodron

Faults

We all carry fault within.
-Hannah Arendt
 
The mystery of existence is the connection
between our faults and our misfortunes.
-Madame de Stael
 
All our faults are committed in darkness
when our consciousness is obscured.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
 
No one would do wrong
if he knew the wrong of it.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
We give way to our faults
by being passive towards them.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Every little fault is a flag for the little self,
for its own dominion.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

If we plant a flower or a shrub and water it daily
it will grow so tall 
that in time we shall need a spade and a hoe to uproot it.
It is just so, I think, when we commit a fault, however small, each day, 
and do not cure ourselves of it.
-Teresa of Avila
 
Few are the faults we flatter
when alone.
-Edward Young
 
Faults are thick
where love is thin.
-James Howell
 
You have within yourself
all the faults which you scorn in others.
-Will Durant
 
There are some faults which men readily admit,
but others not so readily.
-Epictetus
 
We confess small faults,
in order to insinuate that we have no great ones.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
 
We try to make virtues out of the faults
we have no wish to correct.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
 
Those who try to make virtues out of their faults
grope further and further in to darkness.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Almost all our faults are more pardonable
than the methods we resort to to hide them.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
 
Our worst fault
is our preoccupation with the faults of others.
-Kahlil Gibran
 
We hate those faults most in others
which we are guilty of ourselves.
-William Shenstone
 
One should be able to see the faults of others
without hatred.
-Aurobindo Ghose.
 
The greatest of all faults, I should say,
is to be conscious of none.
-Thomas Carlyle
 
You should examine yourself daily.
If you find faults, you should correct them.
If you find none, you should try even harder.
-Xi Zhi
 
He whose faults are not told to him
ignorantly things his defects are virtues.
-Sa'di

Only through the eyes of others
can you see your flaws.
-Chinese Proverb
 
Look upon the man who tells thee thy faults
as if he told thee of a hidden treasure.
-The Dhammapada

Happy is the man
who sees his faults in his youth.
-Proverb
 
If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you,
instead of trying to defend yourself you should say:
'He obviously does not know me very well,
since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned.'
-Epictetus
 
One's own faults are one's mortal enemies.
It follows that to guard against them
is life's gravest concern.
-Tiruvalluvar
 
The real fault is to have faults
and not to amend them.
-Confucius
 
Blaming your faults on your nature
doesn't change the nature of your faults.
-Indian Proverb
 
When you have faults
do not fear to abandon them.
-Confucius
 
The way to overcome error is, first to admit one's fault;
and next, to refrain from repeating it.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Never concentrate on your faults.
By doing so you identify yourself with them.
-Yogananda
 
You will find it less easy to uproot faults
than to choke them out by gaining virtue.
-John Ruskin
 
Every man in his lifetime
needs thank his faults.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
We are all full of weaknesses and errors;
let us mutually pardon each other our follies.
-Voltaire
 
Be like an eye always seeing your own faults,
Be like a blind person toward the faults of others.
-Atisha
 
Overlook the greatest fault of another,
but do not partake of it in the smallest degree.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan

Foolishness

Lord, what fools these mortals be.
-William Shakespeare
 
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
-Alexander Pope

In life, each of us must sometimes play the fool.
-Yiddish Proverb

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool.
-The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.
-Ray Bradbury
 
A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.
-Thomas Fuller
 
Misfortune will follow the fool
-The Oculatum

When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big.
But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal.
-Shunryu Suzuki
 
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
-Tobias Smollett
 
The fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.
-William Blake
 
Wise men think out their thoughts;
fools proclaim them.
-Heinrich Heine
 
What a fool does last
a wise man does first
-The Oculatum
 
The hours of folly are measured by the clock;
but of wisdom, no clock can measure.
-William Blake
 
A fool flatters himself,
a wise man flatters the fool.
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
The wise man understands the fool,
for he himself was once a fool;
but the fool does not understand the wise man,
since he never was wise.
-Persian Proverb
 
One fool is an expert on another.
-Yiddish Proverb
 
Never defend yourself of words from a fool
unless you are willing to become his/her equal.
-Gene Crawford
 
He is a fool
that cannot conceal his wisdom.
-Benjamin Franklin
 
When a fool holds his tongue,
he, too, is thought clever.
-The Bible
 
People do not wish to appear foolish;
to avoid the appearance of foolishness,
they are willing to remain actually fools.
-Alice Walker
 
You are never so easily fooled
as when trying to fool someone else.
-François de La Rochefoucauld
 
When the head is a fool,
the body is in trouble.
-Yiddish Proverb
 
Only a fool grows without rain.
-Yiddish Proverb
 
The fool is always beginning to live.
-Proverb
 
The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.
-Thomas Shadwell
 
That's the penalty we have to pay for our acts of foolishness,
someone else always suffers for them.
-Alfred Sutro
 
To marry a fool
is to be no fool.
-Moliere
 
If the fool would persist in his folly,
he would become wise.
-William Blake

Guilt

What is guilt?
It is moral self-reproach -
I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.
-Nathaniel Branden

Guilt is anger directed at ourselves -
what we did or did not do.
-Peter McWilliams
 
Guilt is anything you did
and fear others to know about.
-Muhammed
 
The guilty heart
needs no accuser
-The Oculatum
 
The guilty think all talk
is of themselves.
-Geoffrey Chaucer
 
A guilty conscience is like that of a whirlpool
drawing in all to itself
that would otherwise pass by.
-Thomas Fuller
 
Guilt has very quick ears
to an accusation.
-Henry Fielding
 
A given excuse that was not asked for
implies guilt.
-Singaporean Proverb
 
A guilty conscience never feels secure.
-Publilius Syrus
 
The guilt being great,
the fear doth still exceed.
-William Shakespeare
 
Innocence has a single voice
that can say over and over again
"I didn't do it."
Guilt has a thousand voices,
all of them lies.
-Leonard F. Peltier
 
Each snowflake in an avalanche
pleads not guilty.
-Stanislaw J. Lec
 
Every man is guilty
of the all the good he didn't do.
-Voltaire
 
Short is the joy
that guilty pleasure brings.
-Euripides
 
Healthy guilt is the emotional core our our conscience.
It is emotion which results from behaving 
in a manner contrary to our beliefs and values.
-John Bradshaw
 
No guilt is forgotten
so long as the conscience still knows of it.
-Stefan Zweig
 
A guilty conscience is a hidden enemy.
-Native American Proverb
 
Let this be your wall of brass,
to have nothing on your conscience,
no guilt to make you turn pale.
-Horace

When there is guilt, let it emblazon the lesson learned on your memory
so that the mistake will never again be repeated.
-Mike Dooley
 
Guilt is the teacher,
love is the lesson.
-Joan Borysenko

Habits

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims,
because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct.
To reform one's maxims is nothing:
it is but to change the title of the book.
To learn new habits is everything,
for it is to reach the substance of life.
Life is but a tissue of habits.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
 
We first make our habits,
then our habits make us.
-John Dryden

Habit is, as it were,
a second nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

To fall into a habit
is to begin to cease to be.
-Miguel de Unamuno

Habit is the will to begin to repeat oneself.
-Gaston Bachelard
 
Habit, if not resisted,
soon becomes necessity.
-Saint Augustine
 
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees,
as brooks make rivers,
rivers turn to seas.
-John Dryden
 
Habits are first cobwebs,
the cables.
-Spanish Proverb
 
Habit is a cable;
we weave a thread of it each day,
and at last we cannot break it.
-Horace Mann
 
Old habits have deep roots.
-Norwegian Proverb
 
The gnarled fidelity
of an old habit
-Rainer Maria Rilke
 
A habit is a shirt made of iron.
-Czech Proverb
 
Habit with its iron sinews,
clasps us and leads us day by day.
-Alphonse de Lamartine
 
Rigid, the skeleton of habit
upholds the whole frame.
-Virginia Woolf
 
Habit is a full-grown mountain,
hard to get over or to pull down.
-Congolian Proverb

The fixity of a habit
is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
-Marcel Proust
 
Old habits die hard.
-Danish Proverb
 
Could the young but realize
how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
-William James
 
Habit is necessary;
it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut,
that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
-Edith Wharton
 
Bad habits are your worst enemies;
against your will they will do the things
that hurt you the most.
-Yogananda
 
Habit is altogether
too arbitrary a master for me to submit to.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
 
Habit is either
the best of servants
or the worst of masters.
-Nathaniel Emmons
 
A habit is the result
of concentration of the mind.
-Yogananda
 
Every habit forms a rhythm.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
Hard to get into the habit of yourself,
Hard to get out of the habit of yourself.
-Gunnar Ekelof
 
Good habits and bad habits
both take time to acquire force.
-Paramahansa Yogananda

Habit is overcome by habit.
-Thomas a Kempis
 
Habit is habit
and not to be flung out of the window by any man,
but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
-Mark Twain
 
Whatever you would make habitual, practice it;
and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it,
but accustom yourself to something else.
-Epictetus

The physical is the slave of certain forces which create a habit
and drive it thought the mechanical power of the habit.
So long as the mind gives consent, you do not notice the slavery;
but if the mind withdraws its consent, then you feel the servitude,
you feel a force pushing you in spite of the mind's will.
It is very obstinate and repeats itself till the habit,
the inner habit revealing itself in the outward act, is broken.
It is like a machine which once set in motion repeats the same movements.
A quiet persistent aspiration will bring you to the point
where the habit breaks and you are free.
-M. P. Pandit
 
Good habits are worth
being fanatical about.
-John Irving
 
Habit, my friend, is practice long pursued,
that at last becomes man himself.
-Evenus

Hatred

Hate is the desire for something or someone
to not exist, to not be.
-John Sandbach
 
Do not hate.
Hatred is a form of subjectivity
that binds you to the hated object.
-Wu Wei
 
Hatred ...is anger
which has been allowed to dwell in the mind
until it has hardened like so much cement.
-Napoleon Hill
 
The greatest hatred,
like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs,
is silent.
-Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
 
No man,
even for his body's sake,
can afford to indulge in hatred.
It is like repeated doses of poison.
-Florence Scovel Shinn
 
Hate is too great a burden to bear.
It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
-Coretta Scott King
 
Hating people
is like burning down your own house
to get rid of a rat.
-Harry E. Fosdick
 
Hate is a consequence of fear;
we fear something before we hate;
 a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
-Cyril Connelly
 
There is no hate without fear.
Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized.
We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking.
Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty,
our privacy, our income, our popularity,
our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves.
If we can isolate. this element in what we hate
we may be able to cease from hating.
Analyze in this way the hatred of ideas
or the kind of people whom we have once loved
and whose faces are preserved in the Spirit of Anger.
Hate is the consequence of fear;
we fear something before we hate;
a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.
-Cyril Connelly
 
Hatred is the coward's revenge
for being intimidated.
-George Bernard Shaw
 
The principal difference between love and hate
is that love is an irradiation, and hate is a concentration.
Love makes everything lovely,
hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.
-Sydney J. Harris
 
A man's hatred is always concentrated on the thing
that makes him conscious of his bad qualities.
-Carl Jung
 
If you hate a person,
you hate something in him that is part of yourself.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
-Hermann Hesse
 
Usually, if we hate, it is the shadow of the person that we hate,
rather than the substance.
We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone
we feared or disliked when younger;
or because we find him some gross caricature
of what we find repugnant in ourself;
or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.
-Sydney J. Harris
 
As long as you hate,
there will be people to hate.
-George Harrison
 
The one who hates
is he who cannot appreciate.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
 
I am a poor hater.
-James A. Garfield
 
I would permit no man...
to narrow and degrade my soul
by making me hate him.
-Booker T. Washington

The price of hating another human being
is loving oneself less.
-Eldridge Cleaver
 
Meet hatred with hatred
and you degrade yourself.
Meet hatred with love
and you not only elevate yourself
but also the one who bears you hatred.
-Ralph Waldo Trine

Hatred which is completely vanquished by love,
passes into love.
-Baruch Spinoza
 
The pure unadulterated love of one person
can nullify the hatred of millions.
-Mohandas Gandhi 

Hell

Every man is his own hell.
-H. L. Mencken

Each man's hell is in a different place.
- Charles Bukowski
 
Hell is a different place for each man,
or each man has his own particular hell.
-Anais Nin
 
I hold it to be the alienable right
of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
-Robert Frost
 
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a shrill sound
Day and night.
-R. S. Thomas
 
Hell is being caught in Ego.
-Carl Jung

I believe that I am in hell,
therefore I am there.
-Arthur Rimbaud
 
I live in my deepest hell,
and from there I cannot fall any further.
-Carl Jung
 
The door to Hell
is locked from the inside.
-James A. Pike
 
There is no greater hell
than to be a prisoner of fear.
-Ben Jonson
 
Hell is other people.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
 
Hell is not other people.
Hell is no other people.
-Fay Weldon
 
Hell isn't other people.
Hell is yourself.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
 
Hell is oneself;
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections.
-T. S. Eliot
 
In this world
we live in a mixture of time and eternity.
Hell would be pure time.
-Simone Weil
 
What is hell?
I maintain that it is the suffering
of not being able to love.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
 
Hell, madam, is to no longer love.
-George Bernanos
 
Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness,
in which there is no love.
-Richard Bach
 
Hell is life drying up.
-Joseph Campbell
 
Hell is the opposite of joy.
It is unfulfillment.
It is knowing Who and What You Are
and failing to experience that.
It is being less.
-Neale Donald Walsch
 
Hell is where you live
when I AM is ignored.
-Kenneth G. Mills
 
Individuals are in hell
when they forget the spiritual essence of their being.
-Haridas Chaudhuri
 
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one -
the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings,
without milestones, without signposts.
-C. S. Lewis
 
Hell is the region where you live
wrapped up in personality and its complexes.
-Kenneth G. Mills
 
Hell is the incapacity to be other than
the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
-Aldous Huxley

The way back home passes through that one place - that one hell -
we want most to avoid.
-Albert Camus
 
Hell is not punishment,
it's training.
-Shunryu Suzuki
 
If you're going through hell,
keep going.
-Winston Churchill
 
And builds a heaven in Hell's despair.
-William Blake

It took me forty years on earth
To reach this sure conclusion:
There is no Heaven but clarity,
No Hell except confusion.
-Jan Struther
 
When you first learn to love hell,
you will be in heaven.
-Thaddeus Golas
 
those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.
-Charles Bukowski

Humiliation

One man's transparency
is another's humiliation.
-Gerry Adams

Your worst humiliation 
is only someone else's momentary entertainment.
-Karen Crockett
 
Humiliation always involves two.
The one who does the humiliating,
and the one who allows himself to be humiliated.
-Etty Hillesum

If you were really humiliated
you had tremendous attachment and blindness.
-Sivananda Radha
 
Nothing was better for you than humiliation,
for there was nothing you felt more deeply.
-Elias Canetti
 
Humility is the only certain defence
against humiliation.
-Anonymous

Idleness

Idleness is many gathered miseries
in one name.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
 
Of all our faults,
the one we excuse most easily
is idleness.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld
 
Between the great things we cannot do
and the small things we will not do,
the danger is that we shall do nothing.
-Adolphe Monod
 
Life is not long,
and too much of it must not pass
in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
-Samuel Johnson
 
Surely man was not created to be an idle fellow;
he was not set in this universal orchard
to stand still as a tree.
-Thomas Dekker
 
Indolence of which you are aware
and indolence of which you are not aware
are a thousand miles apart.
-Chinese Saying
 
Nature knows no pause in progress and development,
and attaches her curse to all inaction.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
Idleness is emptiness;
the tree in which the sap is stagnant remains fruitless.
-Hosea Ballou
 
Iron rusts from disuse,
stagnant water loses its purity,
and in cold weather becomes frozen;
even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
-Leonardo Da Vinci
 
Shun idleness.
It is a rust that attaches itself
to the most brilliant of metals.
-Voltaire
 
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life!
-Alfred Tennyson
 
Too much idleness, I have observed,
fills up a man's time much more completely,
and leaves him less his own master,
than any other sort of employment whatsoever.
-Edmund Burke
 
Idleness is the Dead Sea
that swallows all virtues.
-Benjamin Franklin
 
Inaction will cause a man to sink
into the slough of despond
and vanish without a trace.
-Farley Mowat
 
It is not enough to be busy.
So are the ants.
The question is: What are we busy about?
-Henry David Thoreau
 
A man is not idle
because he is absorbed in thought.
There is a visible labor
and there is an invisible labor.
-Victor Hugo
 
Work is not always required.
There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
-George MacDonald
 
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams,
that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
-Virginia Woolf
 
Rest is not idleness,
and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer's day,
listening to the murmur of the water,
or watching the clouds float across the sky,
is by no means a waste of time.
-John Lubbock
 
In idle dreams I like to rest
preferring the unmanifest.
-Monique Louise De Nelle

Ignorance

Everybody is ignorant,
only on different subjects.
-Will Rogers
 
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance.
We don't know because we don't want to know.
-Aldous Huxley
 
People oppose things
because they are ignorant of them.
-al-Ghazali
 
The highest form of ignorance
is to reject something you know nothing about.
-Wayne Dyer
 
Nothing is more frightful to see than ignorance in action.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ignorance is the night of the mind,
but a night without moon or star.
-Confucius

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion
-Philip Wylie
 
Ignorance is the fact we have not discovered the truth at the root of life
and that truth is absolute integrity.
-Manly Hall

 The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief
 in injustice and tragedy.
-Richard Bach
 
Ignorance knocked, wisdom opened
and ignorance ceased to be!
-Sivananda

Illusion

The world is an illusion,
but it is an illusion which we must take seriously,
because it is real as far as it goes.
-Aldous Huxley
 
Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very pleasant one.
-Albert Einstein

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is great.
-Saul Bellow
 
You create your own illusion,
and become entangled in it.
-Muktananda
 
If we choose,
we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
-Noam Chomsky
 
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
-Voltaire
 
There are as many pillows of illusions
as flakes in a snowstorm.
We wake from one dream into another dream.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
What do any of us have but our illusions?
And what do we ask of others
but that we be allowed to keep them?
-W. Somerset Maugham
 
Men will clutch at illusions
when they have nothing else to hold to.
-Czeslaw Milosz
 
A great deal of intelligence
can be invested in ignorance
when the need for illusion is deep.
-Saul Bellow
 
Illusion is needed
to disguise the emptiness within.
-Arthur Erickson
 
It's a rare person wants to hear
what he doesn't want to hear.
-Dick Cavett
 
Illusion recognized must disappear.
-A Course in Miracles
 
How strange when an illusion dies.
It's as though you've lost a child.
-Judy Garland

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was,
that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?
-Virginia Woolf
 
Losing an illusion makes you wiser
than finding a truth.
-Ludwig Borne
 
Nothing is more hidden from us
that the illusion which lives with us day by day,
and our greatest illusion is to believe
that we are who we think ourselves to be.
-Henri Amiel
 
The real illusion
is to believe that we are separate from God.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
 
Infinite love is the only truth.
Everything else is an illusion.
-David Icke

Impatience

It is our impatience that spoils things.
-Moliere
 
The impatient may not always be wrong on issues,
but they are almost always wrong in their attitudes.
-R. J. Rushdoony
 
Whoever is out of patience
is out of possession of his soul.
-Francis Bacon
 
Waiting does not exist in the experience of those
who recognize the presence of love wherever they are.
-Alan Cohen
 
If we learn to enjoy waiting,
we don't have to wait to enjoy.
-Kazuaki Tanahashi
 
On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference
between those who succeed and fail in all things.
All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree,
and among the less, the patient weak ones
always conquer the impatient strong.
-John Ruskin

Inferiority

If you think that you will be inferior in doing something,
you will be on that road very soon.
-Tsunetomo Yamamoto

Whenever an inferiority complex exists,
there is a good reason for it.
There is always something inferior there.
-Carl Jung
 
If one feels inferior, that's really ambition;
a person wants to be more than one is.
One wants to be a great person and knows one isn't.
-Marie-Louise von Franz
 
While one person hesitates
because he feels inferior,
another is busy making mistakes
and becoming superior.
-Henry Link

Interruption

There cannot be greater rudeness,
than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse;
for if there be not impertinent folly in answering a man
before we can know what he will say,
yet it is a plain declaration,
that we are weary to hear him talk any longer;
and have a disesteem for what he says;
which we, judging not fit to entertain the company,
desire them to give audience to us,
who have something to produce worthy of their attention.
This shows a great disrespect, and cannot but be offensive;
and yet, this is what almost all interruption constantly carries with it.
To which, if there be added, as is usual,
a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said,
it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness,
when we thus intrude ourselves for teachers,
and take upon us, either to set another right in his story,
or shew the mistakes of his judgement.
-John Locke

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