Quotes on Ifs

It would conduce to national progress and save a great deal of time and trouble if we cultivated the habit of never supporting the resolutions either by speaking or voting for them if we had not either the intention or the ability to carry them out.

A man who broods on evil is as bad a man who does evil, if he is no worse.

A man's ledger does not tell what he is, or what he is worth. Count what is in man, not what is on him, if you would know what he is worth-whether rich or poor.

How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.

I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one.

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics.

Teach your children well...and feed them on your dreams...Don't ever ask them why. If they told you you would cry. So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

Always be eager to learn, no matter how successful you might already be. In the Millionaires' Club, we sometimes invite a billionaire to come talk to us. He says, 'You're doing okay, but come on. How about if you really poured it on!'

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no interests because it cannot suffer. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests - at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road because it will suffer if it is.

Select such subjects that your pupils cannot walk out without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk.

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

Thankfully, dreams can change. If we'd all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses.

If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.

If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.

To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.

Chess books should be used as we use glasses: to assist the sight, although some players make use of them as if they thought they conferred sight