If you expect nothing, you’re apt to be surprised. You’ll get it.
—Malcolm Forbes (American Publisher)
Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and pure and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
—Phillips Brooks (American Episcopal Clergyman)
The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.
—James Bryant Conant (American Chemist)
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
—Marcel Proust (French Novelist)
The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success but they labor haphazardly at whatever they are assigned, building up with one hand to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty for turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and ample time, the major ingredients of success, they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle and the real web of their life is never woven.
—Og Mandino
You don’t become enormously successful without encountering and overcoming a number of extremely challenging problems.
—Mark Victor Hansen (American Public Speaker)