God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.

Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.

The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.

For we that live please must please to live.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Have to and get to—both are choices. One is negative and one is positive. Choose the right one and it can change your life.

Change how you see and see how you change.

You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.

They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If all people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Change, But start slowly, because direction is more important than speed.

I have to face life with a newly found passion. I must rediscover the irresistible will to learn, to live and to love.

It does not take a majority of prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.

What though strength fails? Boldness is certain to win praise. In mighty enterprises, it is enough to have had the determination.

If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.

Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking.

You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

Dancing is not just getting up painlessly, like a leaf blown on the wind; dancing is when you tear your heart out and rise out of your body to hang suspended between the worlds.

There is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.

Our life does not develop as a result of chance, but as a result of causes.

Dying is nothing. What is terrible is not to live.

The things which . . . are esteemed as the greatest good of all . . . can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.