The quote database

It is because it is so much easier to shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your average man can do.

Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which is the hardest test.

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.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.

So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes?

Perhaps when all is written courageously, I shall have no courage left to publish it.

It is as impossible in a book to teach a person in charge of sick how to manage, as it is to teach her how to nurse.

Let your doubt be to yourself, your decision to them.

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

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for

To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.

It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues.

Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators.

Energy of temperament, with a moderate degree of wisdom, will carry a man further than any amount of intellect without it.

Courage may be displayed in everyday life as well as in historic fields of action.

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

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better

It is men who wait to be selected, and not those who seek, from whom we may always expect the most efficient service.

SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.

Anyone who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight of responsibility.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.