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Quotable Wisdom
ON TAKING RISKS
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
- James Bryant Conant
ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
- Aldous Huxley
ON ELOQUENCE
It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.
- Vincent van Gogh
ON PERCEPTION
When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity.
- Albert Einstein
ON NOT FOLLOWING THE CROWD
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
- Henry David Thoreau
ON VALUES
When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.
- Fern Naito
ON THOUGHTFUL SPEECH
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
- Robert Frost
ON GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
- Albert Einstein
ON MEASURING YOUR WORDS
Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.
- Baltasar Gracian
ON GOOD STARTS MAKING GOOD FINISHES
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
- Goethe
ON CLEAR, CONCISE COMMUNICATION
Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words.
- Ecclesiasticus
ON STICKING TO YOUR GOALS
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
- Calvin Coolidge
ON TRUE STRENGTH
It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the force and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
ON PLANNING YOUR MOVES
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
- Robert Frost
ON WINNING THROUGH PERSEVERANCE
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
- Benjamin Disraeli
ON STICKING TO YOUR GOALS
You always pass failure on the way to success.
- Mickey Rooney
ON BARRIERS TO SUCCESS
Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because, however successful he may be in overcoming them, he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice.
- W.H. Auden
ON THE VALUE OF CONCISE SPEECH
Say what you have to say, and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.
- Winston Churchill
ON THE SHACKLES OF BEING REASONABLE
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
ON CAREFUL CHOICE OF WORDS
If no thought your mind does visit make your speech not too explicit.
- Peit Hein
ON BUSINESS ETHICS
Moral courage is a more rare commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence.
- Robert F. Kennedy
ON EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
- W.H. Auden
ON MATCHING SKILL WITH LUCK
It isn't enough for you to love money - it's also necessary that money should love you.
- Baron Rothschild
ON PRIMING THE PUMP
The darkest hour of any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.
- Horace Greeley
ON HOLDING YOUR TONGUE
In Maine we have a saying that there's no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.
- Edmund Muskie
ON LEADERSHIP
A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.
- Charles de Gaulle
ON KNOWING WHEN TO GO ON, AND WHEN TO STOP
The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
- Henry Ward Beecher
ON SELLING TO THE HEART AS WELL AS THE HEAD
Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.
- Benjamin Franklin
ON KEEPING YOUR OPTIONS OPEN
In war, as in life, it is often necessary, when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.
- Winston Churchill
ON WINNING WITH GRACE
High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
- Tennessee Williams
ON THE VALUE OF FRESH THOUGHT
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, through it contradict everything you said today.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
ON THE VALUE OF SELLING
Everyone lives by selling something.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
ON WHAT REALLY COUNTS
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.- Laurence J. Peter
ON PERSONAL SUCCESS
Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?
- Paul Getty
ON PLAYING TO YOUR STRENGTHS
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong - but that's the way to bet.
- Damon Runyon
ON REALLY LISTENING
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand
.- Karl Menninger
ON SPEAKING TO BE HEARD AND APPRECIATED
A sick man that gets talking about himself, a woman that gets talking about her baby, and an author that begins reading out of his own book, never know when to stop.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
ON SEEKING TRUTH
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
- Erich Fromm
ON PERSUASION
If you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.
- Lord Chesterfield
ON CONVICTION
Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
ON THE VALUE OF HIGH PRODUCT QUALITY
It is not the employer who pays wages - he only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages.
- Henry Ford
ON MAKING YOUR OWN GOOD LUCK
The harder you work, the luckier you get.
- Gary Player
ON CONFIDENCE
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.
- Dag Hammarskjold
ON CLARITY OF COMMUNICATION
Everyone hears only what he understands.
- Goethe
ON SUCCESS
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.
- Brooke Foss Westcott
ON BEING UNDERSTOOD
"Plain English" - everybody loves it, demands it - from the other fellow.
- Jacques Barzun
ON ACHIEVING GOALS
It is no use saying "we are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
- Winston Churchill
ON BEING CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work 12 hours a day.
- Robert Frost
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF OTHERS
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.
- Albert Einstein
ON WHY WE MUST CONTINUE TO WORK HARD
Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.
- Walt Whitman
ON NEVER GIVING UP
If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Show me a good and gracious loser, and I'll show you a failure.
- Knute Rockne
ON CHOOSING YOUR WORDS VERY CAREFULLY
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
- Alfred North Whitehead
ON HONESTY
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
- Charles Dickens
ON EXTRAORDINARY CUSTOMER SERVICE
You are never giving, nor can you ever give, enough service.
- James R. Cook
ON COURAGE
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
- Peter Drucker
ON WORKING TOWARDS SUCCESS
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
- Henry David Thoreau
ON WHY NEGOTIATION WORKS
Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.
- Dean Acheson
ON STICKING TO YOUR PLAN
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
- Epictetus
ON INTERESTING SPEECH
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
- La Rochefoucauld
ON OPEN-MINDEDNESS
It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.
- Mark Twain
ON UNDERSTANDING OUR REAL ENEMIES
If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
ON TRUE LEADERSHIP
I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them.
- Harold Geneen
ON EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.
- Ordway Tead
ON ACHIEVING YOUR OWN PERSONAL GREATNESS
A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.
- Albert Schweitzer
ON USING YOUR NATURAL GIFTS
Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.
- Erica Jong
ON LIGHTING A CANDLE
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
- Salman Rushdie
ON WHY YOUR SUCCESS IS REALLY UP TO YOU
Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
ON TRUE LEADERSHIP
I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
- Indira Gandhi
ON INDEPENDENT THINKING
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary
- William Wrigley, Jr.
ON CHOOSING YOUR DIRECTION
It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
- George Dennison Prentice
ON THE VALUE OF WORK OVER TIME
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are: and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.
- H.P. Liddon
ON THE VALUE OF ALWAYS SPEAKING POSITIVELY
A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage. People may be amused at the time, but they will be remembered, and brought out against him upon some subsequent occasion.
- Samuel Johnson
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke
