• Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts. (speech to the American Library Assn., June 2005)

• More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world--a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. (speech to the American Library Assn., June 2005)

Oberst, Karen L.

• Jesus, the Light of the World, as we celebrate your birth ... may we begin to see the world in the light of understanding you give us.

  As you chose the lowly, the outcasts, and the poor to receive the greatest news the world had ever known, so may we worship you in meekness of heart. May we also remember our brothers and sisters less fortunate than ourselves in this season of giving. Amen (Light Came at Christmas: Services for the Advent Wreath)

• When they ask me at the Post Office if my package contains anything dangerous, I never know quite how to answer. It contains books, and if a book isn't dangerous, then why was it written?

O'Casey, Sean

• Laughter is wine for the soul--laugh soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm... Once we can laugh, we can live.

• Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

• You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea; you cannot put an idea up against the barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets; you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell your slaves could ever build.

O'Connell, Daniel

• Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.

O'Conner, Flannery

• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

O'Conner, Sandra Day

• Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.

• We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.

O'Connor, Elizabeth

• Because our gifts carry us out into the world and make us participants in life, the uncovering of them is one of the most important tasks confronting any one of us. (Eighth Day of Creation: Gifts and Creativity)

O'Connor, Mary

• It's not so much how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised. The mosquito is swatted.

O'Conor, Hugh

• I think we can't go 'round measuring our goodness by what we don't do, what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include. (Chocolat)

Odiorue, George S.

• Nothing gives a man a sense of failure so often as an overdeveloped sense of perfection.

Odlum, Hortense

• One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have comes from the knowledge that he can do something superlatively well. (A Woman's Place)

O'Donnell, Bridget

• She didn't know it couldn't be done, so she went ahead and did it.

O'Donohue, John

• Although you should not erase your responsibility for the past, when you make the past your jailer, you destroy your future. It is such a great moment of liberation when you learn to forgive yourself, let the burden go, and walk out into a new path of promise and possibility. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• Celtic spirituality is awakening so powerfully now because it illuminates the fact that the visible is only one little edge of things. The visible is only the shoreline of the magnificent ocean of the invisible. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• Creativity is rich with unexpected possibility. Know-how is mere fragmented mechanics which lacks tradition. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. ... When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• Habit is a strong invisible prison. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go towards it. You have to claim your own freedom before it becomes yours. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong )

• It's a dangerous thing to name yourself wrongly or to name yourself unjustly. (Speaking of Faith interview, Feb. 28, 2008)

• Sometimes ideas hold us down; they become heavy anchors that hold the bark of identity fixated in shallow, dead water. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• We have surface time, which is the time we move through every day, but we need to reach the rhythms of deep time. Like the ocean is all waves and movement on the surface, we need to sink through time to the depths where the true rhythm lies. (Speaking of Faith interview, Feb. 28, 2008)

• We rush through our days in such stress and intensity, as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. We worry and grow anxious; we magnify trivia until they become important enough to control our lives. Yet all the time we have forgotten that we are but temporary sojourners on the surface of a strange planet spinning slowly in the infinite night of the cosmos. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life - truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of belonging; they are also the secret intention and dream of human longing. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• When you learn to embrace your self with a sense of appreciation and affection, you begin to glimpse the goodness and light that is in you and gradually you will realize that you are worthy of respect from yourself. When you recognize your limits, but still embrace your life with affection and graciousness, the sense of inner dignity begins to grow. You become freer and less dependent on the affirmation of outer voices and less troubled by the negativity of others. (Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong)

• When you tame and domesticate the divine it loses its danger and it's power to forgive you, make you happy, or its power to challenge you, and call you towards new growth. (Speaking of Faith interview, Feb. 28, 2008)

O'Faolain, Sean

• Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.

Ogilivie, Heneage (Sir)

• The really idle man get nowhere. The perpetually busy man does not get much farther.

Ogilvy, David

• Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of the immortals.

Ohanian, Susan

• A teacher's day is half bureaucracy, half crisis, half monotony and one-eighth epiphany. Never mind the arithmetic. (Ask Ms. Class)

• Trusting children and books is a revolutionary act. Books are, after all, dangerous stuff. Leave a child alone with a book and you don't know what might happen.

• We could revolutionize education if we asked every person connected with the education of children, "Read any good books lately?"

Ohmae, Kenich

• It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.

Oliver, Mary

• Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
  The world offers itself to your imagination,
  Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
  Over and over announcing your place
  In the family of things.

Olivier, Laurence (Sir)

• I take a simple view of living. It is, keep you eyes open and get on with it.

Olson, Robert

• Every new idea looks crazy at first. (The Art of Creative Thinking)

Olson, Sigurd F.

• Life is good to those who know how to live. I do not ever hope to accumulate great funds of worldly wealth, but I shall accumulate something far more valuable, a store of wonderful memories. When I reach the twilight of life I shall look back and say I'm glad I lived as I did, life has been good to me.

O'Malley, Austin

• God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it.

O'Malley, Martin

• Leaders exhibit two essential characteristics, the willingness to confront adversity and a clearly articulated future preference.

Oppenheim, James

• The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

• The optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Orben, Robert

• Don't think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.

Origen

• Free will is the power of choosing good and evil.

O'Rourke, P. J.

• Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

Orr, Louis

• Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature. (speech to the American Medical Association, 6/6/60)

Ortega, Clara

• To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose

• Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

• We cannot put off living until we are ready.

Orwell, George

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. (intro to Animal Farm)

• Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.

• Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

O'Shaughnessy, Arthur

• We are the music makers.
  We are the dreamers of dreams,
  Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
  And sitting by desolate streams;--
  World-losers and world-forsakers,
  On whom the pale moon gleams:
  Yet we are the movers and shakers
  Of the world for ever, it seems.

O'Shea

• Character development is the great, if not the sole, aim of education.

Osler, William (Sir)

• Banish the future. Live only for the hour and its allotted work. Think not of the amount to be accomplished, the difficulties to be overcome, or the end to be attained, but set earnestly at the little task at your elbow, letting that be sufficient for the day.

• To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals--this alone is worth the struggle.

Osmund, Marie

• If you're going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it, you might as well laugh about it now.

Otto, Herbert

• Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.

Overton, Patrick

• When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.

Ovian, Mason

• Make sure that you let them know that you love them while you still have many years to go.

Ovid

• At times it is folly to hasten; at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.

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

• Happy the person who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying, once and for all.

• In our play we reveal what kind of people we are. (The Art of Love)

Oxenham, John

• To every man there openeth A way, and ways, and a way. And the high soul climbs the high way, And the low soul gropes the low: And in between, on the misty flats, The rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth A high way and a low, And every man decideth. The way his soul shall go.