26
No one gets much out of life who does not make his education a real, vital part of himself.
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27
Our ability to make the world better depends entirely upon our ability to use every opportunity to make ourselves better.
28
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear; and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
29
What you imagine, you will think, and what you think, you will become.
30
In brief, whatever you want, produce that something in yourself, and you will positively gravitate towards the corresponding conditions in the external world.
31
The more you are and the more you do, the richer your life, the greater your joy.
32
Be determined to get up, to reach the highest goal you have in view, and you will.
33
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
34
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticise others.
35
The man who never weakens when things are against him will grow stronger and stronger until all things will delight to be for him.
36
Resolve to remain as strong, as determined and as highly enthused during the darkest night of adversity as you are during the sunniest day of prosperity.
37
Our attempts should be not to extinguish nature, but to repress it; not to stand unmoved at distress, but endeavour to turn every disaster to our own advantage. Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Wrongly attributed
The single most-shared sentence ever credited to Confucius, and it is an Irish novelist's. Goldsmith wrote it for the Public Ledger in 1760 and collected it in 1762, in a series of letters supposedly by a Chinese visitor. Letter VII opens with a headnote in Goldsmith's own hand: the Editor thinks proper to acquaint the reader that the greatest part of the following letter seems to him to be little more than a rhapsody of sentences borrowed from Confucius, the Chinese philosopher. Two paragraphs later the narrator says he holds the volume of Confucius in his hand. That framing is precisely how the line became Confucius's, and later Mandela's. Note also the comma after glory, which the popular version drops, and that Goldsmith wrote the same sentence again in Letter XXII with a different opening.
38
I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
Wrongly attributed
Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.
39
the journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step
Confuciusmisattributed·The Tao Teh King, or the Tao and its Characteristics (trans. James Legge)·1891
Wrongly attributed
Not Confucius. The line is from the Tao Teh King, a different book by a different school, traditionally ascribed to Laozi -- a figure whose very existence historians doubt. Two things drift in the popular version: li becomes miles, and commenced becomes begins with. Legge's 1891 translation, the standard English text for a century, says neither.
40
So get out there. Give it everything you’ve got—whether it’s your time, your talent, your prayers, or your treasure.
41
Never be discouraged. Never hold back. Give everything you’ve got.
42
I’ve found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks.
43
I want to fall… forward. At least I figure that way I’ll see what I’m about to hit.
44
And when you fall throughout life—and maybe even tonight after a few too many glasses of champagne—fall forward.
45
Every failed experiment is one step closer to success.
46
To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.
47
You hang around a barbershop long enough—sooner or later you will get a haircut.
48
If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.
49
Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
Eleanor Rooseveltmisattributed·The Invincible Strategy, in The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America, by W. L. Watkinson·1907
Wrongly attributed
Adlai Stevenson used a version of this in his eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962, and it has been hers ever since; it is also sold as Confucius and as an old Chinese proverb. It is neither. It is W. L. Watkinson, the English Methodist preacher, in a sermon called The Invincible Strategy, printed in 1907 -- and he presents it as a saying already in circulation rather than as his own coinage. What is certain is that this is the earliest printed appearance anybody has produced, and it predates Roosevelt's public life.
50
Wretch, you are carrying about a god with you, and you know it not.