Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.
Eleanor Roosevelt · From the chapter "Learning to Be Useful" in her last book, written at 76.
Eleanor Roosevelt · From the chapter "Learning to Be Useful" in her last book, written at 76.
Albert Einstein · Recorded by LIFE editor William Miller during a visit to Einstein's Princeton home a few months before his death.
Aristotle · Opening of his treatment of friendship; standard English translation from the Greek.
Mark Twain · Written in London in 1897 for reporter Frank Marshall White after a newspaper had him dead or dying; the popular "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" is a later misquote.
Henry David Thoreau · The original behind the popular paraphrase "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined", which Thoreau never wrote.
Nelson Mandela · The closing pages of his autobiography, written after his release and his election as South Africa's president.
Nelson Mandela · The closing pages of his autobiography, looking back on the long walk from prison to the presidency.
George Eliot · Dorothea Brooke's question in the novel; George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans.
Allen Saunders · Everyone credits John Lennon, who sang a version in "Beautiful Boy" in 1980; Reader's Digest had printed the line under cartoonist Allen Saunders's name in January 1957.
Forrest Gump · Tom Hanks's title role in Forrest Gump (1994) · Forrest to a stranger on the Savannah bus-stop bench; the American Film Institute ranks it among the top hundred movie quotes.
Henry David Thoreau · On his two years in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond, Massachusetts.
Marcus Aurelius · Private notes written on campaign and never meant for publication; Gregory Hays's 2002 translation.
Socrates · Socrates' words to the jury at his trial in 399 BC as reported by Plato, in Benjamin Jowett's standard English translation.
Helen Keller · Written late in life by a woman who was deaf and blind from the age of nineteen months.
Steve Jobs · From his Stanford commencement address of 12 June 2005, given a year after his first cancer diagnosis.
That is every quote on the shelf, all 16 of them.
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