"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." - Thomas A. Edison

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time we are given."
- Gandalf to Frodo. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential." - Sir Winston Churchill

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." -Eleanor Roosevelt

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent..." - Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, gift, or skill. It will make or break a company...a church...a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes."  - Charles Swindoll  

"Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use." - Earl Nightingale, Motivational Speaker

"When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce.  You look for reasons it is not doing well.  It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun.  You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce.  Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience.  No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change."
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Master and Spiritual Leader

"If you're upset by anything outside yourself, whatever it may be, that thing is not the cause of your pain. The cause of your pain is the value you choose to place on what it makes you experience -- and you have the power to change that at any moment." - Marcus Antoninus

"A man would do nothing, if he waited until he could do it so well that no one at all would find fault with what he has done." - Cardinal Newman

"Don't focus on the days when you failed. Focus on all of the days when you won. Keep a chart, monitor your successes, and don't give up!" - Robert Butterworth

"It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Success isn't something you chase. It's something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it'll come when you least expect it. Most people don't understand that." - Michael Jordan

"I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored." - Bill Cartwright, championship NBA center, Chicago Bulls '91-'93

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." - Winston Churchill

"Goals determine what you are going to be." - Julius Erving

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves 'who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?'Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.It's not just in some of us; its in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson from her book Return To Love

"I just love when people say I can’t do something ... because all my life people said I wasn’t going to make it." - Ted Turner

"Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world making the most of one’s best." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind...let it be something good." - Author Unknown 

"If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." - Vincent Van Gogh

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia."  
- Russel H. Conwell
 
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
- Jack Kerouac From his book On The Road

"The task of genius, and humanity is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously." - Henry Miller

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
~ Buckminster Fuller

"Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?"
- Benjamin Franklin

"Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kill countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues form the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meeting and material assistance, which no one could have dreamt would come their way." - Sir Edmond Hilary

"You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was."
- Irish Proverb

"Let the beauty we love be what we do." - Rumi

"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee." - Marian Wright Edelman

"I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine." - Fritz Perls

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

"There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction." - John F. Kennedy

"What you pursue, you don’t get. But what you allow to grow slowly in its own way, comes to you." - Rabbi Pinhas

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." - Mahatma Gandh

"You create your opportunities by asking for them." - Patty Hansen

"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." - Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States

"One hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in." - Wayne Gretzky

"Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent 
if no birds sang except those that sang best."
- Henry Van Dyke, American Educator

"The best way to predict your future is to create it."
- Unknown

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
-Mark Twain, American Author

“Whether you think you can or think you can't -- you are right.” 
- Henry Ford, Founder Ford Motor Company

"We find greatest joy, not in getting, but in expressing what we are... Men do not really live for honors or for pay; their gladness is not the taking and holding, but in doing, the striving, the building, the living. It is a higher joy to teach than to be taught. It is good to get justice, but better to do it; fun to have things but more to make them. The happy man is he who lives the life of love, not for the honors it may bring, but for the life itself." - R.J. Baughan

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American Civil Rights Leader

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."
- Dale Carnegie, American Author
 
"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared." 
- Buddha, The Enlightened One

back to top