Right Attitudes

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight… When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
—Helen Keller (American Author)

Your biggest challenge isn’t someone else. It’s the ache in your lungs and the burning in your legs, and the voice inside you that yells “Can’t”, but you don’t listen. You just push harder. And then you hear the voice whisper “can”. And you discover that the person you thought you were is no match for the one you really are.
—Unknown

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.
—Marsha Norman (American Playwright)

You wouldn’t worry so much about what people really thought of you if you knew just how seldom they actually do.
—Phil McGraw (American TV Personality)

He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
—Ben Jonson (English Dramatist)

Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew. They’re what make the instrument stretch—what makes you go beyond the norm.
—Cicely Tyson (American Actor)

It is only doubt that creates. It is the minority that counts.
—H. L. Mencken (American Journalist)

Don’t let what you can’t do stand in the way of what you can.
—John Wooden (American Sportsperson)

Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

The sense of humor is the oil of life’s engine. Without it, the machinery creaks and groans. No lot is so hard, no aspect of things is so grim, but it relaxes before a hearty laugh.
—George Spring Merriam

Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are noone’s monopoly.
—Dhirubhai Ambani (Indian Businessperson)

A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope.
—Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
—Edgar Allan Poe (American Poet)

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)

The height of your accomplishments will equal the depth of your convictions.
—William F. Scolavino

It is not what he has, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher)

He who knows that as both in one, the knowledge and the ignorance, by the ignorance crosses beyond death and by the knowledge enjoys immortality.
—Isha Upanishad

The most unfair practice is the equal treatment of unequals.
—Russ Walden

Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully.
—Tryon Edwards (American Theologian)

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Among the things you can give and still keep are your word, a smile, and a grateful heart.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

They can take, by force as the case too often proves to be, the products of your energy. they can plunder what you have sown, by force as the case too often proves to be. but that you have produced, that you have sown anything at all, these are circumstances over which you, and no other, are the master.
—Unknown

It is not what he has, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher)

Between the wish and the thing, life lies waiting.
—Common Proverb

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
—Emile Zola (French Novelist)

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

The virtue of obedience makes the will supple… it inspires the courage with which to fulfill the most difficult tasks.
—John Vianney (French Catholic Priest)

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.
—Robert A. Heinlein (American Novelist)

He that chooses his own path needs no map.
—Christina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish Monarch)

The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.
—Ask Ann Landers

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)

Hail thy brother’s boat across, and lo! thine own has reached the shore.
—Indian Proverb

Refuse to fall down. If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. If you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven, and like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled, and it will be filled. You may be pushed down. You may be kept from rising. But no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Abandon the crowd of distractions and confusions, and rest in the boundless state without grasping or disturbance; firm in two practices: visualization and complete, at this time of meditation, one-pointed, free from activity. Fall not into the power of confused emotions.
—Tibetan Proverb

When you judge others,
you do not define them, you define yourself.
—Earl Nightingale (American Motivational Speaker)

Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. After you become a leader, success is about growing others.
—Jack Welch (American Businessperson)

Words are just words and without heart they have no meaning.
—Chinese Proverb

A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
—Louis Nizer

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
—Cynthia Ozick

The process of living is the process of reacting to stress.
—Stanley J. Sarnoff (American Surgeon)

I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.
—Leo Buscaglia (American Motivational Speaker)

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter, the food taste better, and the humour richer, because they are there.
—Judith Viorst (American Psychoanalyst)

Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
—Richard L. Evans (American Mormon Religions Leader)

Genuinely feeling successful is possible when you detach yourself from the things you desire and allow them to flow to you—and through you.
—Wayne Dyer (American Motivational Writer)

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.
—Annie Besant (British-born Indian Theosophist)

Hard work performed in a disciplined manner will in most cases keep the worker fit and also prolong his life.
—Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (Indian Engineer)

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.
—Leo Buscaglia (American Motivational Speaker)

‘If something’s free, I’ll take two,’ a mentor of mine once said. His point was that people don’t value things they don’t pay for.
—Edwin Feulner (American Economist)

A great mentor is one who aims for others’ abilities to surpass his own.
—Unknown

We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. … Skills of a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice.
—Charlie Munger

A cheerful thought in you produces cheerful thoughts in others. You are filled with joy and intense delight when you see a batch of hilarious children playing mirthfully and dancing in joy.
—Sivananda Saraswati

Be prepared to take some shit in life; just do not take more than a mouthful at a time.
—Movie: Forrest Gump

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (American Physician)

Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos’d as things forgot.
—Alexander Pope (English Poet)

Meditation consists in conducting consciousness beyond the point where it is the consciousness of a finite body or a finite mind, transferring the focus from level to level without losing its continuity or form.
—Vilayat Inayat Khan (British Sufi Mystic)

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
—William Ellery Channing

It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say.
—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (American Sociologist)

To be yourself is an achievement in itself.
—Anonymous

Concern over criticism clogs creativity.
—Duane Alan Hahn

The tragedy of life is not that man loses,
but that he almost wins.
—Heywood Hale Broun (American Journalist)

Leaders establish the vision for the future and set the strategy for getting there; they cause change. They motivate and inspire others to go in the right direction and they, along with everyone else, sacrifice to get there.
—John Kotter (American Academic)

Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)