1. Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

2. No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

3. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

4. In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

5. I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

6. Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

7. The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

1. At every party there are two kinds of people – those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

2. Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and repeat to yourself, the most comforting words of all; this, too, shall pass.

3. Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.

4. Know when to tune out, if you listen to too much advice you may wind up making other peoples mistakes.

5. Maturity: Be able to stick with a job until it is finished. Be able to bear an injustice without having to get even. Be able to carry money without spending it. Do your duty without being supervised.

6. Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

7. Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.

8. People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.

9. Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet; a happy marriage has the tranquility of a lovely sunset.

10. The trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you haven’t thought of yet.

11. Too many people today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

12. One out of four people in this country is mentally unbalanced. Think of your three closes friends; if they seem OK, then you’re the one.

13. One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything before you go to bed.

14. The naked truth is always better than the best dressed lie.

15. Women complain about sex more often than men. Their gripes fall into two major categories: (1) Not enough. (2) Too much.

16. Nobody says you must laugh, but a sense of humor can help you overlook the unattractive, tolerate the unpleasant, cope with the unexpected, and smile through the day.

17. If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold you head high, look it squarely in eye and say, ‘I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.’

18. What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, “In the valley of Cauteretz”, “Break, break, break”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Tears, idle tears” and “Crossing the Bar”. Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, although In Memoriam A.H.H. was written to commemorate his best friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and classmate at Trinity College, Cambridge, who was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, but died from a cerebral hemorrhage before they were married. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, Ulysses, and Tithonus. His use of blank verse, rare in his day, may be related to his complete tone deafness which made it hard for him to follow the conventional rhythms of the poetry of his day. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.

Tennyson wrote a number of phrases that have become commonplaces of the English language, including: “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”, “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die”, “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure”, “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers”, and “The old order changeth, yielding place to new”. He is the second most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations after Shakespeare.

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More Quotes

1. A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.

2. Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that dis-empowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

3. I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk.

4. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

5. It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute… that gives meaning to our lives.

6. Want to learn to eat a lot? Here it is: Eat a little. That way, you will be around long enough to eat a lot.

7. You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

8. How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I’m committed to?

9. If you can’t, you must. If you must, you can.

10. It not knowing what to do, it’s doing what you know.

11. You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully.

12. I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life’s greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.

13. Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.

14. If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.

15. Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

16. Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.

17. More than anything else, I believe it’s our decisions, not the conditions of our lives, that determine our destiny.

18. It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

19. We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.

20. The path to success is to take massive, determined action.

21. One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

22. The truth of the matter is that there’s nothing you can’t accomplish if: (1) You clearly decide what it is that you’re absolutely committed to achieving, (2) You’re willing to take massive action, (3) You notice what’s working or not, and (4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way.

23. The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.

24. If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.

25. All personal breakthroughs being with a change in beliefs. So how do we change? The most effective way is to get your brain to associate massive pain to the old belief. You must feel deep in your gut that not only has this belief cost you pain in the past, but it’s costing you in the present and, ultimately, can only bring you pain in the future. Then you must associate tremendous pleasure to the idea of adopting a new, empowering belief.

26. It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.

Sullivan is a speaker at universities, colleges, and civic organizations in the United States. He has been a guest on national news and political commentary television shows in the United States and Europe. Born and raised in England, he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington, D.C. and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He is an openly gay Catholic.

1. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn’t a profession, it’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you’re all set.

2. I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

3. How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

1. A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.

2. Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one’s first productions.

3. Smile, for everyone lacks self-confidence and more than any other one thing a smile reassures them.

4. A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

5. A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.

6. An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

7. Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

8. Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form.

9. If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

10. If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.

11. Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

12. If, in New York, you arrive late for an appointment, say, “I took a taxi.”

13. Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

14. Modesty and unselfishness – these are the virtues which men praise – and pass by.

15. No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.

16. Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.

17. People are what you make them. A scornful look turns into a complete fool a man of average intelligence. A contemptuous indifference turns into an enemy a woman who, well treated, might have been an angel.

18. Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more human world.

19. The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions.

20. The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

21. To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.

In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature – after Rudyard Kipling – when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.

He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy that he was associated with during his own lifetime, but Camus himself rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked…”

1. A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

2. A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

3. After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

4. After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

5. At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

6. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

7. Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

8. Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

9. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

10. In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

11. Integrity has no need of rules.

12. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

13. Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

14. You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.

1. A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

2. All for one and one for all.

3. All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.

4. All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.

5. How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

6. It is rare that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

7. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

8. Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.

9. Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.

10. As a general rule…people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.