Quotes on Persons

The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly.

One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in this life, and one that many persons never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure, in the common, the near at hand-to see that heaven lies about us here in this world.

Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone. To be able to listen to oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You'd really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

Love is seeing God in the person next to us, and meditation is seeing God within us.

We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

There is no hope of success for the person who does not have a central purpose, or definite goal at which to aim.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.

Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves.

The whole being of any Christian is faith and love. Faith brings the person to God, love brings the person to people.

An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects.

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

You can buy a person's hands but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is.