26
Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
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Attribution
27
The athlete trains for his race; and the mind must be put into training if one will win life's race.
28
It is continuity of purpose alone that achieves results.
29
Every person who amounts to anything feels within himself a power which is ever pushing him on and urging him to perpetual improvement.
30
Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.
31
Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.
32
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
33
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide
34
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emersonmisattributed·Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers, by Muriel Strode, in The Open Court, Volume XVII, Number 567·August 1903
Wrongly attributed
Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.
35
The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
36
For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.
Socratesmisattributed·Of Hearing, in Plutarch's Morals, Volume 1 (corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin)·1878
Wrongly attributed
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel is printed on university walls under Socrates's name. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and the sentence is not in Plato either. It is Plutarch, four hundred years later, in the Moralia essay usually called On Listening to Lectures -- and it is not an aphorism about education but a rebuke to a student who sits and admires the lecturer instead of thinking. Note what the tidy modern version loses: Plutarch does not say the mind is a flame to be kindled, he says it is not a pot, and that what it wants is fuel.
37
In this life we get nothing save by effort.
Theodore Rooseveltverified·The Strenuous Life, an address before the Hamilton Club, Chicago·April 10, 1899
38
The great crisis must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
Theodore Rooseveltverified·The Conditions of Success, an address at the Cambridge Union·May 26, 1910
39
Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.