Albert Einstein:

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Audrey Hepburn:

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

Blaise Pascal:

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Felix Adler:

The conception of worth, that each person is an end per se, is not a mere abstraction. Our interest in it is not merely academic. Every outcry against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally hideous is the affirmation of the principle that a human being as such is not to be violated. A human being is not to be handled as a tool but is to be respected and revered.

An Ethical Philosophy of Life

Felix Adler:

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.

An Ethical Philosophy of Life

Goethe:

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Izaak Walton:

The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

John Dewey:

The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.

Kathleen Norris:

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

Margaret Laurence:

Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all your fellow humans everywhere in the world.

Marian Wright Edelman:

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law, to the strength of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own.

The Conservative

Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.

Rudyard Kipling:

I always try to believe the best of everybody -- it saves so much trouble.

Sogyal Rinpoche:

...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.

Virginia Satir:

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Virginia Woolf:

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

William Ellery Channing:

I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions.

William Ellery Channing:

I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion.

William Lyon Phelps:

This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him.