John Quotes

I think that money spoils most things, once it becomes the primary motivating force.

When people begin to praise us, let us hurry to remember the multitude of ours transgressions, and we will see that we are truly unworthy of that which they say and do in our honor.

We know the utility of prayer from the efforts of the wicked spirits to distract us during the divine office; and we experience the fruit of prayer in the defeat of our enemies.

The man who pets a lion may tame it, but the man who coddles the body makes it ravenous.

He does not show humility who accuses himself (for who will not accept rebukes from himself?), but he who, being rebuked by another, does not decrease his love toward him.

The slave of the belly ponders the menu with which to celebrate the feast. The servant of God, however, thinks of the graces that may enrich him.

I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

Connoisseurs think the art is already done.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.

Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife

Why is it that half of the households in America pay zero income tax? We need some real tax reform.

"The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

That was an important development for me, just realizing that you need to follow your pleasure, at least as a painter. I think any kind of artist needs to, no matter what you're doing.

Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you've known them for a long time.

If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.

I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

All thinking is done with the glands. Logic is added later to tidy things up.

I believe the power to make money is a gift from God...to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind.

I wanted the best for my company, I had to do what I did to succeed. Everyone was lowering their prices to beat there competition so I did the same I eventually beat my competition.

I had to work my way up to be where I am now. All these companies could have done the same.

Money is a way of keeping COUNT on how well you're doing in business.

I was born into it and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there, like air or food, or any other element. The only question with wealth is what you do with it.

Well i know that my company is not corrupt or unfair because i got all this with all my hard work. I see no reason why you say my company was corrupt may you explain to me miss [Ida] Tarbell.

If my name were John D Smith IV I wouldn't have been elected to anything.

Spinning yarns is a protection against the nuttiness... the greed, the hate all around us.

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

Everyone is giving something. Everyone is giving what has their heart. What I'm giving you is what has my heart.

I think the biggest problem in the world is that we have a generation of young people, and maybe two, who don't think it's going to get any better.

To deny this is to deny our own heritage, our own spirit, and our own souls.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

One of the saddest things about US education is that the wisdom of our most successful teachers is lost to the profession when they retire.

To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.

Every living being needs continually renewed, and education is simply the chief process by which renewal occurs.

Nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving.

Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.

As a personality, I'm not one that likes to be center stage. It's not about me, it's about the music. I just want people to listen.

Great leaders are never too proud to learn.

I shall not live 'till I see God; and when I have seen Him, I shall never die.