The quote database

The men you see spending most of their time looking for higher and more lucrative positions are, nine times out of ten, men who have made worthless failures in other places.

Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.

You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.

Wretch, you are carrying about a god with you, and you know it not.

If you have assumed a character beyond your strength, you have both played a poor figure in that, and neglected one that is within your powers.

I am by Nature made for my own good; not for my own evil.

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.

Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded on sand.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.

Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.

If he is perplexed, unhappy, restless, or wretched, let him look to himself, for there and nowhere else is the source of all his trouble.

if you see that anything is within man's power, and part of his proper work, conclude that you also may attain to it

If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.

We have created a fictitious ceiling, a roof, to our expectations of ourselves, a limit — where we think it’s all too good to be true.

Give others and yourself more credit. It just happened, you witnessed it, you just did it, believe it.

No one will insist upon your rights while you yourself doubt that you have any.

No one can pursue a worthy object steadily and persistently with all the powers of his mind, and yet make his life a failure.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

Thrift does not require superior courage, nor superior intellect, nor any superhuman virtue.

Self-respect, originating in self-love, instigates the first step of improvement.

There is little place in active life for the timid good man.

almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses