Quotations
Quotes of The Month Archives
RESULTS
"I want to demonstrate by my life and my results, not my talk, not my wishes, but by my results." -- Gerry Robert
"It is not what you say or hope or wish or intend but only what you do that counts. Your choices tell you unerringly who you really are." -- Brian Tracy
"Life asks us to make measurable progress in reasonable time. That's why they make those fourth grade chairs so small - so you won't fit in them at age twenty-five!" -- Jim Rohn
"As we act 'right,' our right results are guaranteed." -- Mark Victor Hansen
"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. This is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big." -- Jim Rohn
"How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser." -- Lou Holtz
"We will receive not what we idly wish for but what we justly earn. Our rewards will always be in exact proportion to our service." -- Earl Nightingale
"Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time." -- Chilon
"The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy." -- Florence Shinn
"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." -- Andrew Carnegie
"Well done is better than well said." -- Benjamin Franklin
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be." -- Douglas Adams
"Most people seem to want tremendous improvement, instantly. But you'll probably find it's the little things you do that eventually add up to big results." -- Joel Weldon
"It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned." -- Fred A. Clark
BE DIFFERENT
To be self-reliant adults, we need to set some guidelines:
• Be different, if it means higher personal and professional standards of behavior
• Be different, if it means treating animals like people, and people as brothers and sisters
• Be different, if it means being cleaner, neater and better groomed than the group
• Be different, if it means giving more in service than you expect to receive in payment
• Be different, if it means to take the calculated risk
• Be different, if it means to observe, listen and understand before passing judgment.
(Excerpted from Denis Waitley's book Safari to the Soul)
CREATIVITY
"The most important thing I learned from big companies is that creativity gets stifled when everyone's got to follow the rules." -- David Kelley
"Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us will put out more and better ideas if our efforts are appreciated." -- Alexander Osburn
"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun." -- Mary Lou Cook
"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything." -- George Lois
"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem." -- Rollo May
"Artistic creativity is a whirlpool of imagination that swirls in the depths of the mind." -- Robert Toth
"If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning. The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living." -- Marion Woodman
"In order to have a real relationship with our creativity, we must take the time and care to cultivate it." -- Julia Cameron
"Creativity is our true nature; blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem." -- Julia Cameron
"While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness." -- Gilda Radner
CHARACTER
"By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character." -- Grenville Kleiser
"Be a role model not a critic. Don't tell your children, your peers, or your subordinates what to do - show them. And when the lesson is over, keep showing them by demonstrating that your actions are part of your character, not part of their curriculum." -- Denis Waitley
"Character is the impulse reined down into steady continuance." -- Charles H. Parkhurst
"The real character of a man is found out by his amusements." -- Sir Joshua Reynolds
"The highest qualities of character... must be earned." -- Lyman Abbott
"As a man thinks in his heart, so is he." -- Proverbs 23:7, Bible
"Do what you know and perception is converted into character." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Your ability to function well in the inevitable crisis is the true measure of the person you are." -- Brian Tracy
"If it ever came to a choice between compromising my moral principles and the performance of my duties, I know I'd go with the moral principles." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." -- Andre Gide
"A man's life is interesting primarily when he had failed, for it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself." -- Georges Clemenceau
"He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be defected by the former is not likely to be transported with the latter." -- Henry Fielding
"I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears is more than a king." -- John Milton
"My preferred person today is one who is always aware of the needs of others, or their pain and fear and unhappiness, and their search for self-respect. I once liked clever people. Now I like good people." -- Soloman Freehof
"The highest reward for a man´s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it." -- John Ruskin
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved." -- Helen Keller
SUCCESS...
"Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more. " -- A. Lou Vickery
"The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary." -- Thomas Edison
"Success always has a price; success, with integrity, is the real bottom line." -- Denis Waitley
"Success is not a native of any nation neither is it related to any family, so you don´t have an excuse not to leave the imprint of impact of the sand of time before your time is over on this planet." -- Akin A. Awolaja
"Success is creating a state of mind that allows you to obtain anything you really desire." -- Mark Victor Hansen
"The first qualification for success in my view is a strong work ethic."
-- Henry Ford II
"Successful people begin where failures leave off. Never settle for 'just getting the job done.´ Excel! -- Tom Hopkins
"The sages do not consider that making no mistakes is a blessing. They believe, rather, that the great virtue of man lies in his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new man of himself."
-- Wang Yang-Ming
Three rules for success:
Number 1. Do what's right. Be on time, be polite, and be honest; remain free from drugs; and if you have any questions, get out your Bible.
Number 2. Do your best. Mediocrity is unacceptable when you are capable of doing better.
Number 3. Treat others as you want to be treated. Practice love and understanding.-- Lou Holtz
"Show class, have pride, and display character. If you do, winning takes care of itself." -- Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant
Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals. -- Jim Rohn
Hard work often leads to success. No work seldom does. -- Harvey Mackay
The path to success is to take massive, determined action.
--Anthony Robbins
You don't pay the price for success. You enjoy the price for success.
-- Zig Ziglar
VALUES/PRINCIPLES
"The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. That is why I wish to pay fair price for every value. If I have to pay for it or earn it, that makes something of me. If I get it for free, that makes nothing of me." -- Jim Rohn
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Decide what's right before you decide what's possible." -- Brian Tracy
"Personal leadership is not a singular experience. It is, rather, the ongoing process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with those most important things." -- Stephen Covey
"Success is the prize for those who stand true to their ideas!" -- Josh Hinds
"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value." -- Albert Einstein
"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." -- Winston Churchill
"The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world." -- Blaine Lee
"I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; I see that the elementary laws never apologize..." -- Walt Whitman
"Freedom requires that we learn and put into practice the three R's - Respect, Responsibility and Restraint." -- Fr. Brian Cavanaugh, TOR
"Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." -- Thomas Paine
POSITIVE vs. NEGATIVE
"Losers see thunderstorms, winners see rainbows; losers see icy streets, winners put on their ice skates!" -- Denis Waitley
"There are two ways of exerting one's strength; one is pushing down, the other is pulling up." -- Booker T. Washington
"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
-- Charles A. Beard
"Learn from the negative as well as the positive, from the failures as well as the successes." -- Jim Rohn
"Keep your face in the sunshine and you can never see the shadow." -- Helen Keller
"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in very difficulty." -- Winston Churchill
"Life, in all its uniqueness, would not be life without the negatives and the positives. That is why it is important to be a serious student of both." -- Jim Rohn
"The darkest nights bring the brightest days." -- Rick Beneteau
"If you train your mind to search for the positive things about other people, you will be surprised at how many good things you can observe in them and comment upon." -- Alan Loy Mcginnis
"Like taking a morning shower, make the planting of positive thoughts a daily practice." -- Neil Eskelin
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
"It is possible to be a sage in some things and a child in others, to be at once ferocious and retarded, shrewd and foolish, serene and irritable."-- Walter Lippmann
"A man's life is interesting primarily when he had failed - for it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself." -- Georges Clemenceau
"To different minds, the same world is a hell and a heaven."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you approach life with a sense of possibility and the expectation of positive results, you´re more likely to have a life in which possibilities are realized and results are positive." -- Lisa Funderburg
ACTION
"Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny." -- Don Sutton
"We can't afford to waste tears on might-have-beens. We need to turn the tears into sweat that can take us to what can be." -- Denis Waitley
"Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action." -- Brendan Francis
"The most drastic and usually the most effective remedy for fear is direct action." -- William Burnham
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action." -- Anthony Robbins
"Action eradicates fear. No matter what you fear, positive, self-affirming action can diminish or completely cancel that which you are fearful of." -- Mark Victor Hansen
"Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference." -- Nolan Bushnell
"Act with purpose, courage, confidence, competence and intelligence until these qualities 'lock in' to your subconscious mind." -- Brian Tracy
"Take action every day - some small dose at a time." -- Jeffrey Gitomer
"Nothing will work unless you do." -- John Wooden
"Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all." -- Norman Vincent Peale
REFLECTION
"Evaluation of the past is the first step toward vision for the future." -- Chris Widener
"At the end of each day, you should play back the tapes of your performance. The results should either applaud you or prod you." -- Jim Rohn
"We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?" -- Marcus Annaeus Seneca
"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness." -- Leland Val Vandewall
RELATIONSHIPS
"The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart." -- Elisabeth Foley
"Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you, must have somebody to divide it with." -- Mark Twain
"I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends." -- Abraham Lincoln
"The value of a relationship is in direct proportion to the time that you invest in the relationship." -- Brian Tracy
RESOLVE
"'Where there is a will there is a way', is an old true saying. He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often scales the barriers to it, and secures its achievement. To think we are able, is almost to be so -- to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself." -- Samuel Smiles
"There is no chance, no destiny, no fate that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul." -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." -- Leonardo da Vinci
"Disgust and resolve are two of the great emotions that lead to change." -- Jim Rohn
SERVICE/CUSTOMER SERVICE
"Know how to serve in terms of the customer. They don't care what your situation is -- they only care about their situation, their problem. Are you serving them in terms of them or you?" -- Jeffrey Gitomer
"Your customer is anyone who depends on you, or who you depend on for success." -- Brian Tracy
"The only certain means is to render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be." -- Og Mandino
"Make your career a life of service to others and all the good things you desire will come to you." -- Tom Hopkins
SKILLS
"A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals." -- Larry Bird
"Develop the art of being exceptional." -- Patricia Fripp
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." -- Charles Darwin
"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun." -- Pablo Picasso
SLIGHT EDGE
"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee." -- Marian Wright Edelman
"Plan your progress carefully; hour-by hour, day-by-day, month-by-month. Organized activity and maintained enthusiasm are the wellsprings of your power." -- Paul J. Meyer
"A single day is enough to make us a little larger or, another time, a little smaller." -- Paul Klee
"Good work done little by little becomes great work. Your house of success will be built brick by brick." -- Max Steingart
"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear." -- Nelson Mandela, Civil Rights Leader
ON EXPERIENCE
"Building a deck is NOT as hard as you think! I've watched TV personality Bob Vila do it many times, and he is a regular 'do-it-yourselfer' just like you, except that he has knowledge, skill, an unlimited budget and a large staff of experts." -- Dave Barry
"The good times we put in our pocket. The hard times we put into our heart." -- Les Brown
"One mistake will never kill you. The same mistake over and over again will." -- Harvey Mackay
"Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience." -- Denis Waitley
"We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present." -- Adlai E. Stevenson
"Time is the wisest counsellor." -- Pericles
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Experience is an asset of which no worker can be cheated, no matter how selfish or greedy his immediate employer may be." -- Napoleon Hill
"Don't let the learning from your own experiences take too long. If you have been doing it wrong for the last ten years, I would suggest that's long enough!" -- Jim Rohn
"For years I have been accused of making snap judgments. Honestly, this is not the case because I am a profound military student and the thoughts I express, perhaps too flippantly, are the result of years of thought and study." -- George S. Patton
"As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities." -- James A. Froude
"I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy." -- Anthony Robbins
ON EXCELLENCE
"The quality of a person´s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor." - Vincent T. Lombardi
"No one ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction." -- Charles Kendall Adams
"Excellence is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends." -- Brian Tracy
"The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right." -- Edward Simmons
"The quality of a person´s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor." - Vincent T. Lombardi
"The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear, and the opposite of fear is faith. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for, perfection is God´s business." -- Michael J. Fox
"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives." -- Willa A. Foster
"Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life." -- Arnold Bennett
"Excellence can be attained if you...
* Care more than others think is wise.
* Risk more than others think is safe.
* Dream more than others think is practical.
* Expect more than others think is possible." -- Jim Gentil
"My parents ingrained in me early on that the perfect score is always something to strive for. I want to win and I want to succeed no matter what." -- Andrea Jung
"It is incumbent upon us all to raise the bar, whether you are a multibillion-dollar international corporation or a mom-and-pop selling blackberry jam." -- Howard Schmidt
"Do what you love, love what you do, and deliver more than you promise." -- Harvey Mackay
"Don't get complacent. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and set higher standards of achievement for yourself. Once you've achieved a standard of excellence, never let it rest--push yourself even higher." -- Dave Anderson
"The secret to a great report card (getting all "W's") is being and doing WOW! because you want to -- because it´s fun. The absence of WOW! is also a report card." -- Jeffrey Gitomer
"The noblest search is the search for excellence." -- Lyndon B. Johnson
"Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better." -- Pat Riley
"Excellence means when a man or a woman asks of himself more than others do." -- Ortega Y. Gasset
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ON FRIENDSHIP
I think that God will never send,
A gift so precious as a friend.
A friend who always understands,
And fills each need as it demand.
Whose loyalty will stand the test,
When skies are bright or overcast.
Who sees the faults that merit blame,
But keeps on loving just the same.
Who does far more than creeds could do,
To make us good, to make us true.
Earth;s gifts a sweet contentment lend,
But only God can give a friend!
- by: Rosalie Carter
"A friend is a present you give yourself." - Robert Louis Stevenson
"Be slow in choosing a friend, slow in changing." - Benjamin Franklin
"An old friend is better than two new ones." - Russin proverb
"So long as we love and serve; no man is useless while he is a friend." - R.L. Stevenson
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