Manhattan High Schools
BESARS
Program
1.
Samuel
Johnson: “Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of
the sun, may sometimes enable us to see what we do not like.”
2. Henry David Thoreau: “Nothing is so much to
be feared as fear.”
3. William E. Henley: “ I am the master of my
fate; I am the captain of my soul.”
4.
John
Stuart Mill: “The great creative individual...is capable of more wisdom and
virtue than collective man ever can be.”
5.
Norman
Cousins: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
6. Ernest Hemingway: “Courage is grace under
pressure.”
7.
George
Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s
8.
Georgia
O’Keeffe: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have
been that should be of interest.”
9.
Aristophanes:
“Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the
10.
Blaise
Pascal: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
11.
Lost
Star of the Maricopa Tribe: “Everyone who is prosperous or successful must have
dreamed of something. It is not because
one has been a good worker that one is successful, but because one has
dreamed.”
12.
Vince Lombardi: “Winning is not the most important thing; it’s everything.”
13.
Booker
T. Washington: “A sure way for one to lift oneself up is by helping to
lift someone else.”
14.
Hannibal:
“We will either find a way or make one.”
15.
Theodore
Roosevelt: “Do what you can with what you have.”
16.
Eleanor
Roosevelt: “When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”
17.
Arthur
Guiterman: “True success is that which makes
Building stones of old mistakes.”
18.
Addison:
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”
19.
Bulwer-Lytton:
“The pen is mightier than the sword.”
20.
Cervantes:
“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”
21.
Chesterfield:
“You must look into people as well as at them.”
22.
Thomas
Paine: “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is
my religion.”
23.
Bacon:
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed
and digested.”
24.
R.
Choate: “A book is the only immortality.”
25.
Machiavelli:
“Men in general judge more from appearance than reality. All men have eyes but
few have the gift of penetration.”
26.
Alfrieri:
“Often the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.”
27.
Carl
Sandburg: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.”
28.
Jiminy
Cricket: “When your heart is in your dream no request is too extreme.”
29.
Woodrow
Wilson: “We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.”
30.
(unknown)
“Like dreams, small creeks grow into mighty rivers.”
31.
John
Barrymore: “A man is not old until until regrets take the place of dreams.”
32.
André
Maurois: “In literature as in love we are astonished at what is chosen by
others.”
33.
Guy
de Maupassant: “Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an
honest man…a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always
ourselves that we are describing.”
34.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson: “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be
understood.”
35.
George
Bernard Shaw: “Man can climb to the
highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.”
36.
Epictetus:
“Difficulties are things that show what men are.”
37.
Socrates:
“No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”
38.
Ernest
Hemingway: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
39.
Mark
Twain: “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to
anybody.”
40.
Titus
Maccius Plautus: “Nothing is there more friendly to a man than a friend in
need.”
41.
Joseph
Conrad: “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men
alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
42.
Shakespeare:
“Mine honour is my life; both grown in one;
Take
honour from me, and my life is done.”
43.
George
Moore: “The difficulty in life is the choice…the wrong way always seems the
more reasonable.”
44.
Robert
Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.”
45.
Lord
Macaulay: “The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without
abusing it.”
46.
Molière:
“If everyone were clothed in integrity, if every heart were just, …the other
virtues would be well-nigh useless.”
47.
Kermit
the Frog: “It’s not easy being green.”
48.
Lillian
Hellman: “For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the
guilt.”
49.
Jorge
Luis Borges: “A man gradually identifies himself with the form of his fate; a
man is, in the long run, his own circumstances.”
50.
Anaïs
Nin: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until
they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
51.
Emily
Dickinson: “There is no frigate like a book
52.
John
Gray: “A moment in time may make us unhappy forever.”
53.
Alexander
Pope: “To err is human, to forgive is divine.”
54.
Robert
Frost: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.”
55.
Anne
Frank: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at
heart.”
56.
Shakespeare:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.”
57.
Cervantes:
“Can we ever have too much of a good thing?”
58.
William
Jennings Bryan: “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice.”
59.
Peter
Drucker: “There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk
you cannot afford not to take.”
60.
Theodore
Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
61. Wordsworth: Poetry is… “the imaginative expression of strong feeling.” (The same can be said of all literature.)
62.
John
Greenleaf Whittier: “For all sad words
of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”
63.
Horace
Walpole: “This world is a comedy to
those who think, a tragedy to those who
feel.”
64. Logan Pearsall Smith: “The great art of writing is the art of making people real to
themselves with words…”
65.
Willa
Cather: “Every fine story must leave in
the mind of the sensitive reader an
intangible residuum of pleasure, a
cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the
writer’s own, individual, unique…”
66.
Picasso: “Art is a lie which makes us realize truth…”
67. Alfred North Whitehead: “There are no whole truths; all truths are
half-truths.”
68. Plato:
“The beginning is the most important part of the work…”
69. Robert Frost: “Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only
middles.”
70. Ecclesisastes: “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning.”
71. Julius Caesar: “Men willingly believe what they wish.”
72.
Margaret Hungerford: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
73. George Moore: “Art is not Nature, Art is Nature digested…”
74.
Aesop:
Appearances are deceptive…”
75.
Walter Pater: “Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view
of
the age and the people in which it was produced.”
76.
Ezra Pound:
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the
utmost possible degree.”
77.
Ezra Pound:
“Literature is news that stays news.”
79. Virgil:
“Love conquers all.”
80. Shakespeare: “They do not love that do not show their love.”
81. Mahatma Gandhi: “Love always gives. Love
ever suffers, never resents, never
revenges itself.”
82.
La
Rochefoucauld: “If we judge of love by
most of its results, it resembles hatred
more than friendship.”
83.
Frederick
Langbridge: “Two men look out through
the same bars: One sees the mud,
and one the stars.”
84. Seneca:
“It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is
poor.”
85. Machiavelli: “For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with
appearances, as
though they were realities and are
often more influenced by the things that seem than
by
those that are.”
86. from the Tao (Chinese): “When evil recognizes itself, it destroys itself.”
87.
Bible
I, Timothy 6:10: “The love of money is
the root of all evil.”
88.
Aeschylus
(in Agamemnon): “Wisdom comes only through suffering.”
89.
Ryszard
Kapuscinski: “ Life is truly known only
to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”
90.
Sophocles
(in Oedipus Rex): “The greatest
griefs are those we cause ourselves.”
91.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson: “People see only what
they are prepared to see.”
92. Flora Whittemore: “The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”
93.
Will Smith:
“Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is
already there.”
94. Donald Trump: “In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by
what you finally accomplish.”
95. Henry J. Kaiser: “Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.”
96. Harry Belafonte: “You can cage the singer but not the song.”
97.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Books are for nothing but to inspire.”
98.
Walt Disney:
“Believe in the future, the world is getting better, there is still
plenty of
opportunity.”
99. Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
100.
Andy Warhol:
“They
say that time changes things, but you actually have to change
them yourself.”
101. Emily Dickinson: “The past is not a package one can lay away.”
102. Cicero:
“It is pleasant to recall past trouble.”
103.
Rollo
May: “Memory is not just the imprint of
the past upon us; it is the keeper of
what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.”
104. Carlos
Fuentes: "It isn't the past that dies with each of us. The future
dies as well."
105. Lao-Tzu:
“He who knows others is clever; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
106. Albert
Camus: “In the depths of winter,
I finally learned that within me there lay an
107. Confucius: "Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."
108. Booker T. Washington: "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much
by the position
that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
109. Eleanor Roosevelt: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
CRITICAL LENSES ABOUT LITERATURE
William Faulkner: "The best literature is about the old universal truths, such as love, honor, pride, compassion, and sacrifice." (adapted)
Joseph Conrad: "The task of a writer is ‘by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’"
E. M. Forster: "Fiction is truer than history, for it is only in fiction [and drama] that we can understand the hidden life of the characters…"
"In literature, evil often triumphs but never conquers." 6/99
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Good literature substitutes for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through." (adapted) 8/99
Anne Lamott: "When writers write from a place of insight and real caring about the truth, they have the ability to throw the lights on for the reader." (adapted) 1/00
Logan Pearsall Smith: "It is not what an author says, but what he or she whispers, that is important." (adapted) 6/00
Thomas Hardy: "A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman." 8/00
John Steinbeck: "It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and to hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams, for the purpose of improvement." (adapted) 1/01
All conflict in literature is, in its simplest form, a struggle between good and evil." 6/01
Peter Brodie: "What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age." (adapted) 8/01
Richard Wright: "All literature is protest. You can’t name a single literary work that isn’t protest." (adapted) 1/02
Duff Brenna: “All literature shows us the power of emotion. It is emotion, not reason, that motivates characters in literature.” (paraphrased from an interview) 1/03
William Saroyan: “Good people … are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.” 6/03
Oliver Wendell Holmes: “We do not read novels* for improvement or instruction.”
(*For the purpose of writing your critical essay, you may interpret the word novels to include plays, short stories, poems, biographies, and books of true experience.) 8/03
Compiled by: Fran
Lacas and Devorah
Tedeschi (Office of the Superintendent of Manhattan High Schools).