Clare O'Beara > Clare's Quotes

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
― Warren Buffett

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
― Edward Abbey

“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.”
― Calvin Coolidge

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

“We are bees then; our honey is language.”
― Robert Bly

“A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.”
― Robert Baden-Powell

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Buckminster Fuller

“God forbid I go to any Heaven in which there are no horses.”
― R.B. Cunninghame Graham

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“For the best return on your money, pour your purse into your head.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“There’s a law of progress that affects our lives. If you’re not active, you atrophy. If you’re not learning, you’re getting dumber. If you’re not progressing, you’re dying. It’s a forward-moving drive that can be found in all life forms, not just ours, and it can be found at higher and higher levels of systems, such as our global human presence.”
― Bill Hargenrader, Mars Journey: Call to Action Book 1

“Keep in mind that when we limit our exposure to information, or when information itself is scarce, our picture of reality suffers. We become oblivious to both opportunities and hazards. Trends become invisible. History disappears. It's really just two sides of the same coin: the first commitment is as much a commitment to gathering information, from as many sources and in as much volume as can constructively be used, as it is a commitment to facing the facts.”
― John Salka, First In, Last Out: Leadership Lessons from the New York Fire Department

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”
― David Attenborough

“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I had discovered that learning something, no matter how complex, wasn't hard when I had a reason to want to know it.”
― Homer Hickam, Rocket Boys

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads--and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
― Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

“One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping.”
― Cleveland Amory, The Cat Who Came for Christmas

“Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep—it can't be done abruptly.”
― Colm Tóibín

“Set your goals high, and don’t stop till you get there.”
― Bo Jackson

“I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.”
― Maeve Binchy

“Mother put on her serious face. "I can't stand idly by and watch the country go down the Swannee. The political arena is the only logical and reasonable course left open to any decent Irish patriot. Besides, last night the cumann nominated me to contest the seat left vacant by the death of Dinny Blackstone who has represented the area in the Dail for twenty years. Who am I to argue?"
"Sure he's been dead for at least ten years," Rory said. "It's a wonder that anyone finally noticed.”
― Ferdia MacAnna, The ship inspector