The quote database

If you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone.

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.

Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.

Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.

The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent.

Dark pictures and gloomy forebodings are worse than useless.

Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm.

Throw away, in the first place, all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well.

Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Let the day's work suffice; live for it, regardless of what the future has in store, believing that to-morrow should take thought for the things of itself.