"Friendship makes prosperity more brilliant, and lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it."
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."
"If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains."
"Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense."
"Nor has he spent his life badly who has passed it in privacy."
"That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place."
"The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others."
"The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words."
"The safety of the people shall be the highest law."
"True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long."
"Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason."
It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.
A friend is, as it were, a second self.
We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired to glory.
In everything satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.
The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need
In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.
The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best
teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
~Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library are Patience and Fortitude. They were named by then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
