Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
Aristotle

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
Aristotle

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Aristotle

Most people would rather give than get affection.
Aristotle

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Henry David Thoreau

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
Henry David Thoreau

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
Henry David Thoreau

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
Henry David Thoreau

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?
Henry David Thoreau

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
Henry David Thoreau

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
Henry David Thoreau

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Henry David Thoreau

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau

I'd rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed.
Robert H. Schuller

Never bring the problem solving stage into the decision making stage. Otherwise, you surrender yourself to the problem rather than the solution.
Robert H. Schuller

Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas, If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed.
Robert H. Schuller

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
Anais Nin

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
Ernest Hemingway

I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
Ernest Hemingway