Better Angels Quotes

Perchance God will pity a race that sought the better angels of its nature and found only its lesser demons. ~ Robert Breault

In our resolve to build a better world ... we seek to summon what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. ~ James Earl Jones

The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed. ~ Charles Dickens

Lincoln's appeal to 'the better angels of our nature' failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable ~ Felix Frankfurter

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.22 ~ Michael Shermer

Politics has high and low moments. Sometimes it brings out the better angels of our nature; sometimes baser instincts. ~ Jim Leach

I believe it's true that there's good and evil in everyone and it's a constant struggle to have your better angels prevail. ~ William Friedkin

Apology accepted, son. Y'all listen to your better angels next time. They'll save you from having to worry about all the shoulda, coulda, wouldas. ~ Pam Webber

When you are making plans, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. ~ David McRaney

The battle for self-control over an intense undesired habit consists of an endless series of skirmishes, in which our urges and our better angels clash several times each day. ~ Matthew D. Lieberman

If we listen to the better angels of our nature, there are creative and good solutions to serious problems. ~ Matt Damon

He was the keynote speaker for our better angels. ~ Andrew Cuomo

Loyalty - deep, intense, devoted loyalty - to a leader or a culture, to any group, brand or idea, goes far beyond being engaged or having our needs met. We see our emotional selves in that connection. We see our future, our best selves and our better angels in that connection. ~ Bill Jensen

Once it becomes impossible for members of Congress to make a career of legislative service, the temptation to bend a vote for whatever reason may yield to the better angels of their nature. ~ James L. Buckley

To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit.
To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.
When we listen to the better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things
such as goodness, decency, love, kindness.
Greatness comes in simple trappings. ~ Richard M. Nixon

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS ~ Abraham Lincoln

I think we all need to be looking to the better angels of our own selves. We don't need to be looking for great people so much as becoming great people. ~ Marianne Williamson

Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy. ~ Cornel West

Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan's brand of leadership was what I call 'a liturgy of absolution.' He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn't want that? ~ Rick Perlstein

Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw

What then, is it not possible to be free from faults? It is not possible; but this is possible: to direct your efforts incessantly to being faultess. For we must be content if by never remitting this attention we shall escape at least a few errors. When you have said "Tomorrow I will begin to attend," you must be told that you are saying this: "Today I will be shameless, disregardful of time and place, mean;it will be in the power of others to give me pain, today I will be passionate and envious.
See how many evil things you are permitting yourself to do. If it is good to use attention tomorrow, how much better is it to do so today? If tomorrow it is in your interest to attend, much more is it today, that you may be able to do so tomorrow also, and may not defer it again to the third day. ~ Epictetus

I decided that I needed to take a new direction in my life, because any change was better than staying in the pit of depression. I actually visualised it as a pit. ~ Graeme Simsion

I am feeling much better now. I am fairly certain it was your letters that kept me alive. ~ Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I'd have been better off. I wouldn't have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn't have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I'm left-handed. ~ Paul Beatty

I roll over on my back and clutch the book against my chest; then I chuck it on the carpet. It's too heavy to rest on me, too full of history. Not all of it is bad. Some of the memories make me smile. Some of them make me mad. But more dangerously, some of them make me wonder what my life would be like as a girlfriend, what it would be like to have a regular relationship, with all its ups and downs and awkward moments.
I switch out my lamp and stare at the ceiling in the dark, taking a series of shaky breaths. I know that it's better this way, being the one in control. The one in control calls the shots, and the one in control sets the pace.
Most important of all, the one in control doesn't get hurt. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

There are men who collect hearts. I collect heart-shaped asses. They taste better when you bite them, see; bleed more, too, depending on where you go in. ~ Lime Craven

Somehow, the strife made our marriage better. We got back to holding hands and making out on the couch, touching each other during the day, and cuddling in bed.
We'd been distracted by everything, and now we returned to what was important. We laughed; we had fun. I felt again like we were made for each other.
There is a point for everyone, I think, where physical attraction is everything, and it can lead to love. A person looks beautiful to you, and therefore you love them. Beyond that, as you grow with them, as your love deepens, your perception of beauty starts to deepen. At that point, what you love becomes beautiful-or rather, you are better equipped to recognize the inherent beauty.
We were there. Chris would gaze at me in the mirror from the bedroom as I was getting ready for bed, and his eyes would be filled with love. I would lie next to him on the bed and just feel loved, secure in the knowledge that the most amazing man in the world had me in his arms.
And yet, there was a little part of me, a nagging part, that told me I didn't deserve all this happiness. I remember calling a girlfriend around this time and raving about how our marriage seemed to have gone to a new level: Amazing.
Then I added, "But I feel like something bad is going to happen to one of us. Because it's just too perfect. ~ Taya Kyle

Wish me everything that you can wish for the woman you dearly love, and I have as good as got it, John. I have better than got it, John. ~ Charles Dickens

And I understood why he didn't need friends or to be accepted at our shitty racist high school, because he had his music, and that was so much better than anything we had to offer. ~ Matthew Quick

Indifferent souls never part. Impassioned souls part, and return to one another, because they can do no better. ~ Sophie Swetchine

No, I'm not a horse better. Every once in a while somebody will give me a sure thing and of course it's not. ~ M. Emmet Walsh

Gabbe stepped forward. "Cam's right. I've heard the Scale speak of these shifts." She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashmere cardigan as if she would never get warm. "They're called timequakes. They are ripples in our reality."
"And the closer he gets," Roland added, with his usual understated wisdom, "the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, the more frequent and the more severe the timequakes will become. Time is faltering in preparation for rewriting itself."
"Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?" Miles said. Everyone looked at him in befuddlement. "What?" he asked. "Angels and demons don't do homework? ~ Lauren Kate

I've had my heart broken, and it's the hardest thing. Everyone says, 'Give it time, you'll feel better in the morning.' But you don't. You feel like it's never, ever going to heal - especially during the first few weeks. ~ Mollie King

So here we are, a pack of Homo sapiens thinking that we know whether a person is female or male. Now that I've spent a few years researching and talking with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, I am confident saying that male/ female is not the only way to describe gender. The people I've come to know and love in the course of writing and photographing this book have helped me better understand the fluidity of gender and sex.

This lesson for me also reinforces what I've been writing about for years: once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves. ~ Susan Kuklin

Texans ignore "better," long ago forgot the useless word "good." Everything in Texas is "best." ~ Edward Smith

Becoming is better than being ~ Carol S. Dweck

What could be better than to hold your hand out to people less fortunate than you are? ~ Paul Newman

I had to be at work at 8 am this morning, so I set my alarm clock for 7:49. Naturally, my body woke my brain up at 1:11 precisely, and I laid in bed trying to convince myself two things: one, that I function better on little sleep, and two, that I am a genetically modified human that requires 1/8th the required sleep of organically grown men. ~ Jarod Kintz

Nothing preaches better than the act. ~ Benjamin Franklin

The main reason why clinicians may not diagnose personality disorders is that they think that doing so supports therapeutic pessimism. Recent research has shown this is not true; most patients get better, either with time or with treatment, that the prognosis is actually better than in many patients with severe mood and anxiety disorders. ~ Joel Paris

I have a relationship with Christ. It allows me to handle situations better. It allows me to treat people better and it allows me to have a better mental attitude towards baseball. ~ Mark Teixeira

The Book of Mormon is our handbook of instructions as we travel the pathway from bad to good to better and strive to have our hearts changed. ~ David A. Bednar

I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile? At a certain point I decided to keep on because I felt like the work was getting better, and I was taking great pleasure in that. ~ Ben Fountain

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter. ~ Max Beerbohm

But just as she thought she had successfully hidden herself from the beautiful truth of the moment, eagerly welcoming unconsciousness or perhaps even better, death, she was brought back to the life she no longer wanted, cold water breaking across her face before flying into her mouth and up her nostrils. She snapped her eyes open wildly, gasping for breath.
"Not this time," he said, snarling at her, his face inches from her own, "You're going to feel every bit of this. ~ Kristin Elyon

His back was to me and he was wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. His shoulders, the smooth muscles of his back, the wide expanse of smooth, tan skin, was all exposed to the naked eye and I was blinded by the beauty of it. So much, it was a wonder I didn't throw out my hand reeling.
At that thought, he turned and gave me a view of his chest.
At this view, arguably better than his back, I sucked in a breath then whispered to myself, Oh my God. ~ Kristen Ashley

I want to feel better. My wife says she likes me not drinking, not so many highs, so many lows, I don't lose temper, I'm more patient. ~ Mike Bryan

Annie, just once could you not give me a hard time?"
"Maybe someday, but not today."
"Annie, you're making Theo sad." Neither of them realized Livia had been paying attention to them. She peered around Theo's legs. "I think you should tell him your free secret."
"I don't!" She gave Livia a death glare. "And you'd better not, either."
Livia peered up at Theo. "Then you better tell your free secret."
He stiffened. "Annie doesn't want to hear my free secret."
"You have a free secret?" Annie asked.
"Yes, he does." Livia puffed up with four-year-old self-importance. "And I know it."
Now Theo was the one giving Livia the death glare. "Find some pinecones. A lot of them." He jabbed his hand toward the trees behind the gazebo. "Over there."
Annie could only stand so much. "Later," she said. "We need to get back to the cottage and see if mom's awake."
Livia's face turned into a thundercloud. "I don't want to go!"
"Don't give Annie a hard time," he said. "I'll finish the fairy house. You can see it later."
The fire had disrupted Livia's world. She hadn't had enough sleep, and she was as cranky as only an overstimulated four-your-old could be. "I'm not going!" she cried. "And if you don't let me stay, I'll tell your free secrets!"
Annie grabbed her arm. "You can't tell a free secret!"
"You absolutely can't!" Theo exclaimed.
"I can!" Livia retorted. "If they're both the same! ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

To make the world a better place, see the world as a better place. ~ Alan Cohen

Yes, I'm a terrific teacher : Grow, Sarah, but not too much.
Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be
brave, but not so brave you don't need me any more. Your silence
frightens me. When I'm in that silence, I hear nothing, I feel like
nothing. I can never pull you into my world of sound any more
than you can open some magic door and bring me into your
silence. I can say that now. ~ Mark Medoff

That was when I found out that you could talk to them and it was a whole other way to blow your stack, and it's so much fun to perform that you want to do it again and the more you get out of it the better. ~ Leo Kottke

If you want things to change, You have to change. If you want things to be better, You have to be better. ~ Jim Rohn

Things do not grow better; they remain as they are. It is we who grow better, by the changes we make in ourselves. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I am alone. Never will I believe You care for me The truth is Having faith in you is foolish I don't think My well-being is your first priority I know We'll protect each other Is just silly. I believe Remaining on my own Is the smartest course of action Staying with you Is the fastest way to Firstdeath Walking - no, running - away from you Won't be easy, but I'm willing to do it And I know that We're better off together Is a lie. For I'm certain of this: I am alone. Two ~ Gena Showalter

It's hard to tell our bad luck from our good luck sometimes. And most of us have wept copious tears over someone or something when if we'd understood the situation better we might have celebrated our good fortune instead. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

When I had people scratchin' my shorts a bit, it played better. We lost a bit of that in all the personnel changes and it's an element we need to get back. ~ Tom Bergeron