Mainspring Quotes

#1. The heart is the mainspring.

Smith Wigglesworth

#2. Resistance to revelation, resistance to becoming conscious of all that dwells within us - high and low, light and dark - is the anti-change factor. It is also the mainspring of all our psychological fears.

Guy Finley

#3. The notion that we are children of God, his own sons and daughters, lies at the heart of all Christian theology, and is the mainspring of all Christian living.

Sinclair B. Ferguson

#4. Hope is the mainspring of life.

Henry L. Stimson

#5. The imagination is the spur of delights ... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Marquis De Sade

#6. Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.

Italo Calvino

#7. Self-love is always the mainspring, more or less concealed, of our actions; it is the wind which swells the sails, without which the ship could not go.

Emilie Du Chatelet

#8. This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

Samuel Smiles

#9. It has always been the depth of my belief, my faith, or my love that was the mainspring of my behavior. When once I believed in doing a thing, nothing could prevent my doing it.

Margaret Sanger

#10. Hope is the mainspring of human action; faith seals our lease of immortality; and charity and love give the passport to the soul's true and lasting happiness.

Alfred Billings Street

#11. In the laws of Connecticut, as well as in all those of New England, we find the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of American liberty at the present day.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#12. There are two principles of established acceptance in morals; first, that self-interest is the mainspring of all of our actions, and secondly, that utility is the test of their value.

Charles Caleb Colton

#13. Honor begets honor; trust begets trust; faith begets faith; and hope is the mainspring of life.

Henry L. Stimson

#14. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.

Eugene V. Debs

#15. God spare me sclerosis of the curiosity, for the curiosity which craves to keep us informed about the small things no less than the large is the mainspring, the dynamo, the jet propulsion of all complete living.

John Mason Brown

#16. Our hope in Christ for the future is the mainspring and the mainstay of our joy down here today.

Charles Spurgeon

#17. Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

Horace Mann

#18. It is the mainspring of life, courage. And courage has many faces.

Oriana Fallaci

#19. Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Max Beerbohm

#20. The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

Charles Baudelaire

#21. We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.

Frederic Bastiat

#22. While there are many causes for which a state goes to war, its fundamental object can be epitomized as that of ensuring the continuance of its policy - in face of the determination of the opposing state to pursue a contrary policy. In the human will lies the source and mainspring of conflict.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#23. Men's moral principles are weak enough without their being made subordinate to selfishness; and their selfishness is quite active enough, without any such effort as Christianity makes to constitute it the mainspring of all their conduct.

Lysander Spooner

#24. ... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.

Cirilo F. Bautista

#25. Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts.

Clarence Day Jr.

#26. Challenge is the core and the mainspring of all human activity. If there's an ocean, we cross it; if there's a disease, we cure it; if there's a wrong, we right it; if there's a record, we break it; and finally, if there's a mountain, we climb it.

James Ramsey Ullman

#27. Over a wide field of our economy it is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century's "hidden hand" than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring, freedom of competitive enterprise.

John James Cowperthwaite

#28. The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy - man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.

Carl R. Rogers

#29. Joy is the mainspring in the whole
Of endless Nature's calm rotation.
Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll
In the great Time-piece of Creation.

Friedrich Schiller

#30. What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.

Virginia Woolf

#31. Everybody's mainspring is different. And I want to say this - folks whose mainsprings are busted are better dead.

Margaret Mitchell