1
The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind thoughts.
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2
I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
3
There is a vast difference between working and being worked.
4
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticise others.
5
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
Eleanor Rooseveltmisattributed·The Invincible Strategy, in The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America, by W. L. Watkinson·1907
Wrongly attributed
Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.
6
It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.
Epictetusdisputed·The Encheiridion, in A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus (trans. George Long)·1888
Attribution contested
The fifth maxim is the source of the modern slogan it is not what happens to you but how you react to it, which translates nothing Epictetus wrote and has no attested author. The paraphrase stops halfway. Epictetus opens by saying men are disturbed by their opinions about things rather than by the things, but he ends here -- taking the blame yourself is only the middle stage, and the finished man blames nobody at all.
7
No man can rob us of our Will--no man can lord it over that!
8
Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things which you blame are the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy.
9
If you want liberty you yourselves must strike the blow. If you must be free you must become so through your own effort, through your own initiative.
10
The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.
11
Do not fall into the entitlement trap of feeling you are a victim, you are not. Get over it and get on with it.
12
Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.
13
The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.
Theodore Rooseveltverified·Citizenship in a Republic, in African and European Addresses·April 23, 1910
14
Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.