Writing Prompts

“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” — Benjamin Franklin, 18th-century American Founding Father, inventor and statesman (from his autobiography)

“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in time of great moral crisis.” — Dante Alighieri, 13th/14th-century Italian poet (from the Divine Comedy)

“Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.” — George Bernard Shaw, 19th/20th-century Anglo- Irish dramatist and wit

“Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.” — Ayn Rand, 20th-century Russian/American author and philosopher

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” — Thomas Carlyle, 19th- century Scots-English historian, author

“Few men think, yet all will have opinions.” — George Berkeley

“Most of one’s life … is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.” — Aldous Huxley, 20th-century English author

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair, 20th-century American author

“Necessity is an interpretation, not a fact.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th-century German philosopher

“My Son, these maxims make a rule
An lump them ay thegither:
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither.” — Robert Burns, 18th-century Scottish poet

“Ideology is just an escape from thought.” — John Kenneth Galbraith, 20th-century North American economist, statesman, author

“The proper man understands equity, the small man profits.” — Confucius, ancient Chinese sage

“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.” — G.K. Chesterton, 19th-century English essayist and poet

“Those who give too much attention to trifling things become generally incapable of great ones.” — François duc de la Rochefoucauld, 17th-century French memoirist and philosopher

“Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.” — Jose Ortega y Gasset

“The death of dogma is the birth of reality.” — Immanuel Kant, 18th-century Prussian geographer and philosopher

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.” — Francis Bacon, 16th-century English statesman, scientist and author

“When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.”— John Kenneth Galbraith, 20th- century North American economist, author and diplomat

“A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” — Winston Churchill, 20th-century British prime minister and war leader, Nobel Prize-winning author

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common.” — John Locke, 17th-century English philosopher

“It is theory that decides what we can observe.” — Albert Einstein, 20th-century Swiss mathematician, physicist and public philosopher

“In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.” — Anton Chekhov, 19th-century Russian dramatist

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” — Anne Frank, victim of the mid-20th-century Nazi Holocaust in Europe (from her Diaries)

“There are two levers for moving men — interest and fear.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, 19th- century French general and emperor

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” — James Madison, 18th-century American Founding Father, 19th-century U.S. president

“Somebody does somethin’ stupid, that’s human. They don’t stop when they see it’s wrong, that’s a fool.” — Elvis Presley, 20th-century American celebrity singer

“The tendency of man’s nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downward.” — Meng-Tse

“People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them.” — Cal Thomas, 20th-century American journalist

“In general, men are ungrateful and fickle, dissemblers, avoiders of danger and greedy of gain.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, Florentine Renaissance writer and political adviser

“It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.” — Henry Miller, 20th-century American novelist

Cicero’s Six Mistakes of Man (according to Arthur F. Lenehan)

1. The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others
2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying
6. Attempting to compel other persons to believe and live as we do.

“Optimism is the father that leads to achievement.” — Helen Keller, 20th-century American social activist, public speaker and author

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” — Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Prize-winning 20th-century American civil rights leader (from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech)

“What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning, French existentialist writer

“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.” — Martin Luther, 15th/16th-century German priest and scholar whose questioning of certain church practices led to the Protestant Reformation

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.” — Albert Einstein, 20th-century Swiss mathematician, physicist and public philosopher

“I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.” — Carl Sandburg, 20th- century American poet and writer

“Great hopes make great men.” — Thomas Fuller

“The future belongs to those who believe in their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt, 20th-century American stateswoman, First Lady

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” — John Galsworthy, 20th-century English poet

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?” — Robert Browning, 19th-century English poet

“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.” — Herbert Hoover, 20th-century American public servant, U.S. president

“Those who believe they can do something are probably right — and so are those who believe they can’t.” — Unknown

“A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.” — Elbert Hubbard, 19th/20th-century American entrepreneur and philosopher (founder of the Roycroft firm)

“A leader is a dealer in hope.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, 19th-century French general and emperor

“If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith and we have hope, and we can work.” — Jacques Cousteau, 20th-century French explorer, inventor, environmental activist and author

“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.” — Carl Schurz, 19th-century German-American politician

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” — John Ruskin, 19th-century British critic and author

“Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” — Horace Walpole, 18th-century English author and man of letters

“Light tomorrow with today.” — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 19th-century English poet

“He who has lost confidence can lose nothing more.” — Boiste

“No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.” — George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 19th-century English novelist

“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” — Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), 19th-century American humorist

“A promise made is a debt unpaid.” — Robert W. Service (in “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” 1907)

“We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.” — Abraham Lincoln, 19th-century American president

“The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.” — Pope John Paul II

“I have not observed men’s honesty to increase with their riches.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (letter to Jeremiah Moor, 1800)

“Honesty isn’t a policy at all; it’s a state of mind or it isn’t honesty.” — Eugene L’Hote

“Don’t tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.” — Logan Pearsall Smith

“Frankness invites frankness.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist, public philosopher and poet

“An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.” — Emily Post, 20th-century American etiquette advisor and author

“The pursuit of truth will set you free — even if you never catch up with it.” — Clarence Darrow, 20th-century American lawyer

“Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths.” — Edgar A. Shoaff

“All advertising, whether it lies in the field of business or of politics, will carry success by continuity and regular uniformity of application.” — Adolf Hitler, 20th-century leader of Germany’s Third Reich

“The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” — Jean Giraudoux

“Regardless of the moral issue, dishonesty in advertising has proved very unprofitable.” — Leo Burnett, 20th-century American advertising pioneer

“When all else fails, tell the truth.” — Donald T. Regan, 20th-century American business executive, Treasury Secretary, chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan

“A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.” — Edgar J. Mohn

“If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.” — The Talmud

“What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t witness with your mouth.” — Jewish proverb

“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.” — Elvis Presley

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and realistic.” — John F. Kennedy, 20th- century American president (from the Yale Commencement address, 1962)

“A belief is not true because it is useful.” — Henri Amiel

“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.” — A.E. Housman

“When somebody lies, somebody loses.” — Stephanie Ericsson

“Flattery makes friends, truth enemies.” — Spanish proverb

“Lying can never save us from another lie.” — Vaclav Havel, 20th-century Czech poet and political activist, first president of post-Communist Republic

“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready to call it falsehood tomorrow.” — William James, 19th-century American philosopher and author

“Time, whose tooth gnaws away at everything else, is powerless against truth.” — Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist and essayist (1825-1895)

“We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castaneda, 20th-century Latin American mystic and author

“All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it’s truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.” — Dennis Prager, 20th-century American radio host and author

“Don’t worry. Be happy.” — Meher Baba, 20th-century Indian spiritual leader (popularized in a song by Bobby McFerrin, 20th-century American songwriter and performer)

“Be happy. Talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours…. never doubt the excellence and permanence of what is yet to be. Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness…. Your success and happiness lie in you…. The great enduring realities are love and service…. Resolve to keep happy and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” — Helen Keller, 20th-century American social activist, public speaker and author

“Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty.” — Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher

“I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (in letter to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811)

“To describe happiness is to diminish it.” — Henri Stendahl, 19th-century French novelist

“I believe… that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (in a letter to John Adams, 1816)

“People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.” — Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher (from the Nichomachean Ethics)

“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, Nobel Prize-winning 19th-century Russian novelist (from Anna Karenina)

“If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” — Charles-Louis de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, 17th/18th-century French jurist and political philosopher

“A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.” — Seneca, Roman statesman and author

“Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.” — Andre Gide, 20th-century French author

“The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.” — Woody Allen, 20th-century American humorist and filmmaker

“All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.” — Lord Byron, 19th- century English poet

“If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.” — Bertrand Russell, 20th-century British mathematician and philosopher

“Happiness is knowin’ you’ve done a good job, whether it’s professional of for another person.” — Elvis Presley

“See to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you.” — James Freeman Clarke

“Those who seek happiness, miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.” — Holbrook Jackson “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” —Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist

“A great obstacle to happiness is expecting too much happiness.” — Bernard de Fontanelle “Happiness is not the end of life: character is.” — Henry Ward Beecher, 19th-century American preacher

“The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not our circumstances.” — Martha Washington, 18th-century American First Lady

“To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist, public philosopher and poet

“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.”
— John Wesley, 18th-century Anglican clergyman

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke, 18th-century English political philosopher

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt, 20th-century German political philosopher and author

“Most people are good only so long as they believe others to be so.” — Friedrich Hebbel “No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.” — Juvenal, Roman writer

“The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” — Miss Prism to Cecily in “The Importance of Being Earnest”

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes nor between parties either — but right through the human heart.” — Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, 20th- century Russian Nobel Prize-winning novelist

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, 19th-century English novelist

“Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.” — Denis Diderot, 18th- century French philosopher and writer

“No wind favors he who has no destined port.” — Michel de Montaigne, 16th-century French man of letters and essayist

“We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.” — (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan, 20th-century Canadian writer and educator

“The future enters into us, in order to transform us, long before it happens.”— Rainer Maria Rilke, 19th-century German poet

“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” — Carl Jung, 20th- century Swiss founder of analytical psychology

“With our thoughts we make the world.” — Buddha

“We are the people our parents warned us about.” — Jimmy Buffett, 20th-century American songwriter, performer

“Since changes are going on anyway, the great thing is to learn enough about them so that we will be able to lay hold of them and turn them in the direction of our desires. Conditions and events are neither to be fled from nor passively acquiesced in; they are to be utilized and directed.” — John Dewey, 19th-century American philosopher and education reformer

“Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.” — William O. Douglas, 20th-century American jurist, Supreme Court justice

“The way to be safe is never to be secure.” — Benjamin Franklin, 18th-century American Founding Father, inventor and statesman

“Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” — Helen Keller, 20th-century American social activist, public speaker and author

“Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.” — Paul Bowles, 20th-century American novelist

“The future comes one day at a time.” — Dean Acheson, 20th-century American secretary of state

“Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 20th-century Belgian adventurer and author

 

“Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.” — Dennis Wholey, 20th/21st-century self-help author and journalist

“It is reasonable that every one who asks justice should do justice.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (letter to George Hammond, 1792)

“It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.” — Arthur Vandenberg, 20th-century American senator

“Grub first, then ethics.” — Bertolt Brecht, 20th-century German dramatist

“The belly comes before the soul.” — George Orwell, 20th-century British journalist and novelist

“Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.” — Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 19th-century American journalist, author and humorist

“Rise above principle and do what is right.” — Walter Heller, 20th-century American economist

“You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.” — Billie Holiday, 20th-century American singer

“The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due.” — Justinian I

“A generous and noble spirit cannot be expected to dwell in the breasts of men who are struggling for their daily bread.” — Dioysius of Halicarnassus

“All bad precedents begin as justifiable measures.” — Julius Caesar

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, 20th-century American theologian

“I take it that what all men are really after is some form of, perhaps only some formula of, peace.” — Joseph Conrad, 19th-century Polish/English novelist

“Charity isn’t a good substitute for justice.” — Jonathan Kozol, 20th-century American journalist and author

“False hope is worse than despair.” — Jonathan Kozol, 20th-century American journalist and author

“I do get scared about the physical danger from drug dealers. But it’s not in the same league as the danger I feel eating an $80 lunch with my privileged friends to discuss hunger and poverty. That’s when my soul feels imperiled.” — Journalist Jonathan Kozol, on his work chronicling the lives of the poor in the Bronx

“Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor.” — Ogden Nash, 20th-century American dramatist

“This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 19th/20th-century American adventurer and politician, Nobel Prize-winning U.S. president

“When a man hangs from a tree it doesn’t spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.” — E. B. White, 20th-century American essayist

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” — A.J. Muste

“If you want to work for world peace, go home and love your families.” — Mother Teresa of Calcutta, 20th-century nun and founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech)

“There’s a hole in the moral ozone and it’s getting bigger.” — Michael Josephson, 20th/21st- century American ethicist

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” — G.K. Chesterton, 19th-century English essayist and poet

“That which is beautiful is moral. That is all, nothing more.” — Gustave Flaubert, 19th-century French novelist

“Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th-century German philosopher

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.” — Oscar Wilde, 19th-century English wit and author

“The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.” — Albert Schweitzer, 20th-century German Nobel Peace Prize-winning mission doctor and theologian

“In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.” — Immanuel Kant, 18th-century Prussian geographer and philosopher

“The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.” — Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist and essayist (1825-1895)

“Morality is stronger than tyrants.” — Saint-Just

“Morality, when formal, devours.” — Albert Camus, Nobel Prize-winning, 20th-century French “existentialist” novelist

“A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.” — Charles Darwin

“Morality begins at the point of a gun.” — Mao Tse-Tung, 20th-century revolutionary founder of modern China

“Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.” — Bertrand Russell, 20th-century British mathematician and philosopher

“The essence of morality is the subjugation of nature in obedience of social needs.” — John Morley, 19th-century British statesman

“Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.” — Ayn Rand, 20th-century Russian/American novelist and philosopher