It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) American writer, pilot
Diary (1932-09-27), Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973)
(Source)
Approximately six months after the kidnapping/murder of her son, Charles, Jr., and a month after the birth of her second son, Jon.
Quotations about:
long-term
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.
Bill Gates (b. 1955) American software magnate [William Henry Gates III]
The Road Ahead, “Afterword” (1996 ed.)
(Source)
First use of this specific formulation, but similar phrases can be traced back to the 1960s. More discussion of variations on this theme: People Tend To Overestimate What Can Be Done In One Year And To Underestimate What Can Be Done In Five Or Ten Years – Quote Investigator®.
But heard are the voices,
Heard are the sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
“Choose well: your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.”[Doch rufen von drüben
Die Stimmen der Geister
Die Stimmen der Meister:
Bersäumt nich zu üben
Die Kräfte des Guten.]Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, statesman, scientist
“Symbolum” (1815) [tr. Carlyle (1843)]
(Source)
(Source (German)).
Carlyle's loose translation first appears in Past and Present, Book 2, ch. 17 "The Beginnings" (1843), then is expanded in a speech at the University of Edinburgh (2 Apr 1866), reprinted (with Goethe's original) in On the Choice of Books (1877).
"Choose well: your choice is brief and yet endless," is sometimes attributed to Ella Winter. She references it in an anecdote in And Not to Yield: An Autobiography (1963).
You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood — and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.
Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as well as by martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
“Montaigne; or, The Skeptic,” Representative Men, Lecture 4 (1850)
(Source)
A politician, for example, is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) American theologian and author
“Wanted, a Statesman!”, Old and New Magazine (Dec 1870)
(Source)
Often paraphrased: "A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation."
