Quotes by theme

power

Quotes including the word “power”.

72 results
Aeschylus

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

Thomas Aquinas

Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.

Marcus Aurelius

You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize that, and you ll find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Marcus Aurelius

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under your observation in life.

Francis Bacon

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

Mikhail Bakunin

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

Balzac

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Balzac

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Brendan Behan

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.

Karen Blixen

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

Boccaccio

You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.”

Giordano Bruno

There is a descent from God through the world to animals, and an ascent from animals through the world to God. He is the highest point of the scale, pure act and active power, the purest light.

Robert Burns

Oh would some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselves as others see us.

Caesar

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

Cervantes

Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn.

Ray Charles

Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.

Joseph Conrad

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

Gustave Courbet

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired.

Ihab Darwish

For me music is powerful. It brings peace in people’s hearts & minds as it overcome barriers and form strong bonds.

Democritus

People invented the Goddess of Luck to justify their own lack of willpower.

Dostoevsky

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

Umberto Eco

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

Epictetus

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Epictetus

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

Epicurus

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

Epicurus

There is only one way to happiness, you have to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Foscolo,

Everything stays in the power of heart and no people, no sky, not even our interests can ever change.

Paulo Freire

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

Sigmund Freud

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.

Gauguin

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

Jean Genet

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

Hawthorne

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Hobbes

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

Hobbes

Knowledge is power.

Victor Hugo

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.

William James

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Wassily Kandinsky

Color is a power which directly influences the soul.

Per Lagerkvist

All human culture is but an attempt at something unattainable, something which far transcends our powers of realization.

Wanda Landowska

The power and magic of music lie in its intangibility and its limitlessness. It suggests images, but leaves us free to choose them and to accommodate them to our pleasure.

Lautreamont

It is a power stronger than will. Could a stone escape from the laws of gravity? Impossible. Impossible, for evil to form an alliance with good.

John Locke

Government has no other end than the preservation of property.” Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right.

Nelson Mandela

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Herbert Marcuse

Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.

Yukio Mishima

True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.

Montesquieu

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion.

Jim Morrison

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

Napoleon

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

Isaac Newton

My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.

Ovid

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

Thomas Paine

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Pericles

Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.

Pittacus

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Plutarch

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

A. Edgar Poe,

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Ezra Pound

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Proudhon

All parties without exception, when they seek for power, are varieties of absolutism.

Saadawi

I don't think that people in power can be convinced by words or articles. They will never give it up by choice.

Saadawi

When you have increasing power of religious groups, oppression of women increases. Women are oppressed in all religions.

Sartre

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

Bernard Shaw

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Mary Shelley

I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.

Mary Shelley

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Upton Sinclair

The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the know-ledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.

Skinner

We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.

Tennyson

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

Tesla

The spread of civilization may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

Thucydides

When one is deprived of ones liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.

Voltaire

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

L. Wittgenstein

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

Virginia Woolf

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.