W. L. George Quotes

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

The open secret of real success is to throw your whole personality into your problem.

But what a man can do and what a man will do are two different things, he knew.

She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear.

Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them back. - Areo Hotah

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?

You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you.

Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills and ravens.

Every flight begins with a fall.

My favorite shots are the practice swing and the conceded putt. The rest can never be mastered.

The more wisdom we know the more we may earn. Those who seek to learn more of their craft shall be richly rewarded.

The kind of doctor I want is one who when he's not examining me is home studying medicine.

Do your duty as you see it, and damn the consequences.

The leader must be an actor.

Audacity, audacity, always audacity.

Staff officers of inharmonious disposition, irrespective of their ability, must be removed. A staff cannot function unless it is a united family.

If you go into a battle, it's better to win the first time.

Go forward until the last round is fired and the last drop of gas is expended...then go forward on foot!

No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage.

If we aren't victorious, let no man come back alive!

If you can't get them to salute when they should salute and wear the clothes you tell them to wear, how are you going to get them to die for their country?

Be prudent, and if you hear, * * * some insult or some threat, * * * have the appearance of not hearing it.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

Nowadays it seems that moral education is no longer considered necessary. Attention is wholly centered on intelligence, while the heart life is ignored.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself.

...smile first, then speak.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you're from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

The big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated.

Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.

The financial markets play an active role in determining what's going to happen, how the economy is going to function.

The trouble with institutional investors is that their performance is usually measured relative to their peer group and not by an absolute yardstick. This makes them trend followers by definition.