Orators

"Omnia mors poscit. Lex est, non poena, perire."

"He that is a friend to himself, is a friend to all mankind."

"Si vis amari, ama."

"Quid enim refert, quantum habeas? multo illud plus est, quod non habes."

"Vivamus, moriendum est."

"Quædam iura non scripta, sed omnibus scriptis certiora sunt."

"Thus the Phrygians, earliest of all races, call me Pessinuntia, mother of all gods. Thus the Athenians, sprung from their own soil, call me Cecropeian Minerva and the sea-tossed Cyprians call me Paphian Venus, the archer Cretans Diana, Dictynna, and the trilingual Sicilians Proserpine; to the Eleusinians I am Ceres, the ancient godess, to others Juno, to others Bellona and Hecate and Rhamnusia. But the Ethiopians, who are illumined by the first rays of the sun-god as he is born every day, together with the Africans and Egyptians, who excel through having the original doctrine, honour me with my distinctive rites and give me my true name of Queen Isis."

"He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; He will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence."

"But when all this has befallen, Asclepius, then the Master and Father, God, the first before all, the maker of that God who first came into being, will look on that which has come to pass, and will stay the disorder by the counterworking of His will, which is the good."

"No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the Gods of heaven, will be heard or believed."

"The pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good."

"Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven."

"They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which He has built..."

"And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it."

"Accessi confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia vectus elementa remeavi, nocte media vidi solem candido coruscantem lumine, deos inferos et deos superos accessi coram et adoravi de proximo."

"Nam cum coeperis deae servire, tunc magis senties fructum tuae libertatis."

"En adsum tuis commota, Luci, precibus, rerum naturae parens, elementorum omnium domina, saeculorum progenies initialis, summa numinum, regina manium, prima caelitum, deorum dearumque facies uniformis, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso: cuius numen unicum multiformi specie, ritu vario, nomine multiiugo totus veneratus orbis."

"Sanus est, qui scit quid sit insania, quippe insania scire se non potest, non magis quam caecitas se videre."

"Ad vivendum velut ad natandum is melior qui onere liberior."

"Parit enim conversatio contemptum; raritas conciliat admirationem."

"And thus He will bring back His world to its former aspect, so that the Cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing."

"It is a world of startling possibilities."

"Democracy is on trial in the world, on a more colossal scale than ever before."

"The truly civilized man has no enemies."

"When the first just and friendly man appeared on the earth, from that day a fatal Waterloo was visible for all the men of pride and fraud and blood."

"Is it not plain that the law of good will has a universal application? There is no event, no act, no word, no supreme crisis of life in which man may let the good will go, and turn on the forces of ill will, egotism, and selfishness. Letting the good will go out of him, he lapses straightway into the child or the savage. Keeping the flow of the serene good will in his soul, he walks the earth, fearless, erect, with God’s sunshine on his face. To live thus is the essence of civilization; the individual and the social welfare are thus secured and harmonized. To live thus is practical religion; the more thoroughly we try, test, and experience it, the more completely it will be found to grow out of, and to illustrate, a Theology, that is, a divine plan of the universe. This Theology matches the needs of civilized men in a civilized world."

"The truth is, that what men demand in life, and miss if they do not find it, is not antagonism and warfare, but struggle, effort, cost, strenuousness. It is not hate and enmity that have ennobled warfare. It is not killing that has made the life of the soldier fruitful in moral lessons. It is the nerve, endurance, hardihood, and courage that we love to see. Of these superb qualities there is likely to be a demand to the end of the human course; for it is out of these things that life is forever being wrought. The grown man conceives the universe, not as two impossible opposites in conflict, but as one harmonious structure; out of his soul, brought into unison with God, all hate has vanished."

"The conception of life as constructive rather than antagonistic effort finds beautiful illustration in every approach that we make toward true civilization. You measure the quality and the value of the civilization of individuals or peoples, not by the houses which they live in or the clothes which they wear, but by the width and power of their sympathy."

"The Golden Rule works like gravitation."

"Good Will is the mightiest practical force in the universe."

"It is absurd to suppose, if this is God’s world, that men must always be selfish barbarians."

"Religion is as healthy and normal as life itself."

"Golden hours of vision come to us in this present life, when we are at our best, and our faculties work together in harmony."

"¡Qué rico es ser boricua!"

"Business strategy should not be a grand and sweeping overview. It should be more like an under view, a peek beneath the covers to look in great detail at what is going on."

"Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else."

"The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want."

"In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations."

"People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect."

"Those who can create wealth — and know that they can — are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves."

"In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed a regular pattern in distributions of wealth or income, no matter the country or time period concerned. He found that the distribution was extremely skewed toward the top end: A small minority of the top earners always accounted for a large majority of the total wealth. The pattern was so reliable that Pareto was eventually able to predict the distribution of income accurately before looking at the data. Pareto was greatly excited by his discovery, which he rightly believed was of enormous importance not just to economics but to society as well. But he managed to enthuse only a few fellow economists.... Pareto's idea became widely known only when Joseph Moses Juran, one of the gurus of the quality movement in the twentieth century, renamed it the "Rule of the Vital Few." In his 1951 tome The Quality Control Handbook, which became hugely influential in Japan and later in the West, Juran separated the "vital few" from the "trivial many," showing how problems in quality could be largely eliminated, cheaply and quickly, by focusing on the vital few causes of these problems. Juran, who moved to Japan in 1954, taught executives there to improve quality and product design while incorporating American business practices into their own companies. Thanks to this new attention to quality control, between 1957 and 1989, Japan grew faster than any other industrial economy."

"Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others. If you don’t aim for it all, you’ll never get it all. To aim for it requires that you know what you want"

"Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined."

"Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent."

"Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk."

"Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within."

"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing that goodness to emerge. If peace is really what you want, then choose peace. The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace."

"Equating the physical body with "I," the body that is destined to grow old, wither, and die, always leads to suffering. To refrain from identifying with the body doesn't mean that you no longer care for it. If it is strong, beautiful, or vigorous, you can appreciate those attributes—while they last. You can also improve the body's condition through nutrition and exercise. If you don't equate the body with who you are, when beauty fades, vigor diminishes, or the body becomes incapacitated, this will not affect your sense of worth or identity in any way. In fact, as the body begins to weaken, the light of consciousness can shine more easily."

"The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again."

"People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens to them for their happiness. They don't realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe. It changes constantly. They look upon the present moment as either marred by something that has happened and shouldn't have or as deficient because of something that has not happened but should have."