A little encouragement

Motivational quotes

Encouragement from books, speeches, and lives well lived. Every quote includes its available source and attribution.

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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle·The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant·1926misattributed

Durant's chapter on Aristotle, in the paragraph on the golden mean. Read in the 1927 printing of the 1926 book.

Wrongly attributed

This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.

There is no royal road to the control of the brain.

Arnold Bennett·The Human Machine·1908verified

Bennett refusing, in the middle of a self-improvement book, to promise a shortcut.

The brain can be trained, as the hand and eye can be trained; it can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and by similar methods.

Arnold Bennett·The Human Machine·1908verified

The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind thoughts.

Arnold Bennett·The Human Machine·1908verified

It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.

Arnold Bennett·How to Live on 24 Hours a Day·1910verified

On the correspondents who wanted to exceed an already full programme.

Drive thy business, let not that drive thee; and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, as Poor Richard says.

Benjamin Franklin·Franklin's Way to Wealth; or, Poor Richard Improved·1758disputed

Attribution contested

Franklin made the proverb famous and is now given it outright, but he did not write it. It is recorded in English more than a century before he was born, in the Book of St Albans in 1496 and in John Clarke's proverb collection of 1639. Franklin's own contribution is the half nobody quotes: drive thy business, let not that drive thee.

God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.

Benjamin Franklin·Franklin's Way to Wealth; or, Poor Richard Improved·1758disputed

Spoken in the essay by Father Abraham, the old man Franklin invents to quote Poor Richard back at a crowd.

Attribution contested

Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.

I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it

Benjamin Franklin·The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin·circa 1790verified

Franklin at seventy-nine, on the thirteen-virtue chart he had kept since his twenties.

While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.

Benjamin Franklin·The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin·circa 1790verified

Why the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection turned out to be harder than he had imagined.

Cast down your bucket where you are.

Booker T. Washington·The Atlanta Exposition Address, in Up from Slavery·September 18, 1895verified

The refrain of the five-minute speech that made him nationally famous, taken from a parable about a becalmed ship signalling for water at the mouth of the Amazon.

I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.

Booker T. Washington·Up from Slavery·1901verified

What he took from watching General Armstrong work through the last six months of a paralysing illness.

out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth

Booker T. Washington·Up from Slavery·1901verified

Written of the Negro boy who must work harder than a white youth for the same recognition, in the chapter where Washington says he no longer envies him.