Narayana Murthy Quotes

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

[W]hen the President's visitors came to Guinea, we were all called on to go and entertain them. I've never seen a country that did what Sékou Touré did for artists. Even in South Africa today we are not nurtured like that.

Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.

I am not satisfied in making money for myself. I endeavor to provide employment for hundreds of the women of my race.

Move from apathy to action. Aim at becoming better than me. Luck will favour those who are prepared

I was born in a poor country. I was poor, but I lived all my life with what I had. I didn’t spend more than I had. Cape Verde is not the only place where there are poor people

Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record.

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

Don't you know that a good and excellent person does nothing for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted right?

Don’t sit down and wait for opportunities to come. Get up and make them.

You just mentioned Bob Marley —  I can remember when I was in college, listening — and not agreeing with his whole philosophy necessarily, but raising my awareness of how people outside of our country were thinking about the struggles for jobs and dignity, and freedom.

In conclusion I congratulate you, my fellow-citizens, upon the high state of prosperity to which the goodness of Divine Providence has conducted our common country. Let us invoke a continuance of the same protecting care which has led us from small beginnings to the eminence we this day occupy.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.