1. An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

Mignon McLaughlin was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in New York City, where her mother, Joyce Neuhaus, was a prominent lawyer. She graduated from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1933 and returned to New York, where she embarked on a career as a journalist and a powerful and touching writer of short stories for Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and other women’s magazines.

She worked for Vogue magazine in the 1940s, and was Copy Editor and Managing Editor of Glamour magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. She retired to Florida in 1973. She died in Coral Gables, Florida on December 20, 1983.

With her husband Robert McLaughlin—an editor at TIME Magazine—she wrote the play Gayden, which had a limited run on Broadway during the 1949 season.

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More Quotes:

1. Courage can’t see around corners but goes around them anyway.

2. Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.

3. There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.

Gandhi is commonly known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi (Sanskrit: महात्मा mahātmā or “Great Soul“, an honorific first applied to him by Rabindranath Tagore), and in India also as Bapu (Gujarati: બાપુ, bāpu or “Father”). He is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation; his birthday, 2 October, is commemorated there as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.

Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience while an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, during the resident Indian community’s struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he organized protests by peasants, farmers, and urban labourers concerning excessive land-tax and discrimination. After assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women’s rights, build religious and ethnic amity, end untouchability, and increase economic self-reliance.

Above all, he aimed to achieve Swaraj or the independence of India from foreign domination. Gandhi famously led his followers in the Non-cooperation movement that protested the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (240 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930. Later he campaigned against the British to Quit India. Gandhi spent a number of years in jail in both South Africa and India.

As a practitioner of ahimsa, he swore to speak the truth and advocated that others do the same. Gandhi lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn he had hand spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and social protest.

Famous Sayings by Gandhi

1. A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

2. A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.

3. A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

4. A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

5. Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

6. An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

7. An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

8. Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

9. Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.

10. As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.

11. Be the change that you want to see in the world.

12. Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

13. Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

14. Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.

15. Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

16. I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

17. I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

18. I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.

19. I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

20. If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.

21. It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

22. It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

23. It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

24. It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

25. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

26. Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.

27. Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

28. The moment there is suspicion about a person’s motives, everything he does becomes tainted.

29. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

30. There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.

31. You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. By the time of his death in 1968, he had refocused his efforts on ending poverty and opposing the Vietnam War, both from a religious perspective. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004; Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. national holiday in 1986. (Continue reading at Wikipedia)

I Have a Dream

1. A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

2. A lie cannot live.

3. A man can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.

4. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

5. At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

6. Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

7. Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

8. Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

9. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

10. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

11. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

12. I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

13. If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

14. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

15. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

16. Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

17. Seeing is not always believing.

18. That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

19. The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

1. Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.

2. Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.

3. Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

4. He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

5. Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, “This is a misfortune” but “To bear this worthily is good fortune.”

6. How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

7. I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

8. Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

9. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

10. The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

11. The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away.

12. Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

13. Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

14. When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Twain enjoyed immense public popularity. His keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature”. (Continue reading at: Wikipedia)

Mark Twain’s Books:
1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library)
2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Penguin Classics)
3. Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer Detective and Other Stories

Search for more books by Mark Twain and books related to him.

1. As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.

2. Fill you mind with the meaningless stimuli of a world preoccupied with meaningless things, and it will not be easy to feel peace in your heart.

3. Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.

4. If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed.

5. In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.

6. Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.

7. Nothing liberates our greatness like the desire to help, the desire to serve.

8. Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.

9. The first step in forgiveness is the willingness to forgive.

10. The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of us is the work of contributing to the healing of the world.

11. The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

12. The spiritual path – is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.

13. We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what’s wrong in your life, or you can focus on what’s right.

14. Imagine the most amazing thing you could do with your life. Now whatever you just thought of, that was it! Hold the thought. Cherish it and let it in…

15. Happiness isn’t circumstance-dependent; it’s a frame of mind. You and you alone decide how to interpret everything that happens.

16. Patience is the spiritual power to wait with faith, remembering that the universe is on your side even when other people aren’t.

How can the universe support a vision that you yourself won’t hold tenderly and steadily within your heart? Your consciousness is your spiritual womb. Be quietly and proudly pregnant with the most beautiful possibilities for your future.

For extra reading: Our Deepest Fear by Marianne Williamson