Quotes on Ifs

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.

If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself and I think that's often hard for us to do.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.

Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy.

Never in history has the navy landed an army at the planned time and place. But if you land us anywhere within 50 miles of Fedela and within 1 week of D-Day. I'll go ahead and win.

Marriage is like mushrooms: we notice too late if they are good or bad.

. . . the enemy of righteousness also works in little steps, so small that they are hard to notice if you are thinking only about yourself and how great you are. Just as truth is given to us line upon line and the light brightens slowly as we obey, even so, as we disobey our testimony of truth lessens almost imperceptibly, little by little, and darkness descends so slowly that the proud may easily deny that anything is changing.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.

Well, I mean, if a joke or humor is bawdy, it's got to be funny enough to warrant it. You can't just have it bawdy or dirty just for the sake of being that - it's got to be funny.

If you would know the value of money; go, and try to borrow some! For, he that goes a borrowing, goes a sorrowing! and indeed, so does he that lends to such people, when he goes to get it in again!

I think also, that general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of youth, than from exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think moreover, that talents for the education of youth are the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed, whenever a way is opened for use of them, is as strongly called as if he heard a voice from heaven.