"There is no accounting for tastes, as the woman said when someone told her her son was wanted by the police." "Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air." "I cannot afford to waste my time making money." "A man can do all things if he but wills them." "He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life." "Death was afraid of him because he had the heart of a lion." "Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions." "Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity." "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of." "I was prettily devised of Aesop, "The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, 'What dust do I raise!'" "Inspiration comes of working every day." "What is work and what is not work are questions that perplex the wisest of men." "I have discovered that we may be in some degree whatever character we choose. Besides, practice forms a man to anything." "Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have." "I am ready any time. Do not keep me waiting." "Every action we take, everything we do, is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be." "On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn when youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet." "Ready money is Aladdin's lamp." "Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish." "If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." "It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe." "Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at." "Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle." "It is necessary to try to surpass one's self always; this occupation ought to last as long as life." "Never give in, "A man is a worker. If he is not, then he is nothing." "Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it." "Know thyself." "You cannot have a proud and chivalrous spirit if your conduct is mean and paltry; for whatever a man's actions are, such must be his spirit." "The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action." "Anything for the quiet life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse." "We never know how high we are "All heiresses are beautiful." "Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works." "Courage is the price life exacts for granting peace." "Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, or device, not knowledge, nor wisdowm, in the grave whither thou goest." "I never did anmything worth doing by accident; nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work." "Only a life lived in the service to others is worth living." "The ideals that have lighted my way and, time after time, have given me nw courage to face life cheerfully have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth." "People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character." "What a new face courage puts on everything!" "The never-ending task of self improvement..." "What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say." "As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist." "There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its length: a quiet conscience." "The undertaking of a new action brings new strength." "How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become--to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being." "Others have done it before me. I can, too." "There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objefction, namely, that it is not true." "We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that Fortune sells what she is thought to give." "There is a form of eminence which does not depend on fate; it is an air which sets us apart and seems to prtend great things; it is the value which we unconsciously attach to ourselves; it is the quality which wins us deference of others; more than birth, position, or ability, it gives us ascendance." "We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself." "We improve ourselves by victories over ourself. There must be contests, and we must win." "Know theyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly." "Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." "The man who is born with a talent which he was meant to use finds his greatest happiness in using it." "Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends." "We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden." "When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is duty, life is slavery." "It is enough that we set out to mold the motley stuff of life into some form of our own choosing; when we do, the performance is itself the wage." "To will is to select a goal, to determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action." "The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly." "Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becomeing proportionately brutified." "Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity." "The world judge of men by their ability in their professions, and we judge of ourselves by the same test; for it is on that on which our success in life depends." "With all humility, I think, 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing." "I detest the man who hides one thing in the depth of his heart and speaks forth another." "Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this." "Who then is free? The wise man who can govern himself." "Does he counsel you better who bids you, 'Money, by right means, if you can; but by any means, make money'?" "I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. If you want me to play only the ntoes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake. Never be afraid to dare." "There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life." "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson he learns thoroughly." "The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying." "The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way." "We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible... Nevr suffer an eception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life." "Do every day or two something for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test." "I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be... a grat athlete and make amillion a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the sain'ts; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life, be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them." "I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: 'This is the real me!'" "Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." "Don't spend your money till you have it." "For who is pleased with himself?" "Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rules of compositon; it produces vigilance rather than elevation ; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor." "The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit." "The love of money grows as the money itself grows." "By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man." "Life is unfair." "During the first period of a man's life, the danger is not to take risk." "In my last two years in high school, my face was pocked with pimples, I stammered when I spoke; if I made a mistake, I blushed furiously, and when nervous, as I was in the company of girls, I perspired freely." "Riches are chiefly good because they give us time." "Only two kids enjoy high school. One is captain of the football team, and the other is his girl friend." "Play the man, Mastre Ridley; we shall this day light such a cndle, by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out." "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that's my religion." "After spending some money in his sleep, Hermon the Miser was so infuriated that he hanged himself." "He was the consummate politician. He didn't lie, neither did he tell the truth." "So our Lord God commonly gave riches to those gross asses to whom he vouchsafed nothing else." "Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth." "I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy-- deep down. All is well." "They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure." "I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism-- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle." "Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne." "The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity." "The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do." "Shun security." "The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it." "My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends-- It gives a lovely light." "Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will." "I speak truth, not as much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older." "In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but byour word." "I do myself a greater injury in lying that I do him of whom I tell a lie." "On his mounting the scaffold to be beheaded: 'I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.' To the executioner: 'Pick up thy spirits, Man, and be not afraid to do thyne office; my neck is very short; take heed, therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thyne honesty.'" "The only thing I like about rich people is their money." "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." "What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?" "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "It is always the definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain." "To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." "At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no etraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time." "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger." "One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth." "And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, 'I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did for yourself?'" "Believe me! The secret of reaping the gratest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!" "I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best." "Nowadays nothing but money counts: a fortune brings honors, friendships, the poor man everywhere lies low." "Who is not satisfied with himself will grow; who is not so sure of his own correctness will learn many things." "Let us do our duty in our shop or in our kitchen, in the market, the street, the office, the school, the home, just as faithfully as if we stood in the front rank of some great battle, and knew that victory for mankind depends on our bravery, strength, and skill. When we do that, the humblest of us will be serving in that great army which achieves the welfare of the world." "One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better." "If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened." "Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash." "I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition." "But it is a pretty thing to see what money will do!" "I realized the problem was me and nobody could change me except myself." "Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty." "The day, water, sun, moon, and night-- I do not have to purchase these things with money." "Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, at as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine." "Courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness, one of which is a lack, the other an excess of courage." "Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuite of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit." "I have know many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could." "She knw how to trust people... a rare quality revealing a character far above average." "A man never describes his own character so clearly as when he describes another." "Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared." "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by each experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." "I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experiences behind him." "Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness." "Anything you're good at contributes to happiness." "Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliance than justice." "The will of a man is his happiness." "Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax." "It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character." "Danger and delight grow on one stalk." "If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail." "Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." "Many a man has found the acquisition of wealth only a chane, not an end, of miseries." " Folks may say you're different, that you have gone and lost your senses, but the world is your to walk-in, go ahead and leap the fences." "How use doth breed a habit in man!" "Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the complulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation." "Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness." "I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it." "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough." "A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind." "I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of dangr, and a mental willingness to endure it." "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year." "It is energy-- the central element of which is will--that produces the miracle that is enthusiasm in all ages. Everywhere it is what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action." "With the great part of rich people, the chief employment of riches consists in the parade of riches." "There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is to no avail." "The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves." "Whome do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day... Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as in humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober-minded men." "How man are the things I can do without!" "A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning would have proved a coward." "Few men are of one plain, decided color; most are mixed, shaded or blended; and vary as much from different situations, as changeable silks do from different lights." "Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other... to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani." "The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise." "Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succeed." "The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face." "I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you." "As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it doesnot agree with my constitution." "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." "If one advances confidently in the dirction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." "It is a great art to saunter." "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? 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 and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak." "And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning." "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." "What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval." "If he [Tom Sawyer] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." "In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth." "You have endured worse things; God will grant an end even to these." "Go on and increase in valor, O Boy, this is the path to immortality." "They can becaue they think they can." "What's the point of having money if nobody knows it!"-Well-dressed woman in a Cadillac showroom "Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline." "We could hardly wait to get up in the morning!" "One chops the wood, the other does the grunting." -Yiddish proverb "A half truth is a whole lie." "He who marries for money earns it." "Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly as he thinks." ~ Home ~ Movies ~ Songs ~ Anonymous ~ Women ~ |