151
Every person who amounts to anything feels within himself a power which is ever pushing him on and urging him to perpetual improvement.
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Attribution
152
It is the hopeful, buoyant, cheerful attitude of mind that wins.
153
Optimism is a success builder; pessimism an achievement killer.
154
All our limitations are in our own minds, the supply is there waiting in vast abundance.
155
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.
156
Success is jealous of scattered energies.
157
The present time is the raw material out of which we make whatever we will.
158
Great tenacity of purpose is the only thing that will carry you over the hard places which appear in every career to ultimate triumph.
159
Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.
160
Success is the child of two very plain parents--punctuality and accuracy.
161
No one can pursue a worthy object steadily and persistently with all the powers of his mind, and yet make his life a failure.
162
The result of it all may be summed up in his favourite motto, “Be kind, for every one is fighting a hard battle.”
Platomisattributed·“Ian Maclaren”: The Life of the Rev. John Watson, D.D., by W. Robertson Nicoll·1908
Wrongly attributed
Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.
163
This joy of life, this joy of work, in man is absolutely true.
164
The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be.
165
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
166
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
167
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
168
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best
169
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide
170
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.
171
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.
172
The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
173
Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.
174
Industry enables men to earn their living; it should also enable them to learn to live.
175
There is a dignity in the very effort to save with a worthy purpose, even though the attempt should not be crowned with eventual success.