151
When the need comes, there is a power deep within us that answers the call.
The complete collection
The quote database
Every quote we hold, 1549 of them from 213 people across 387 works. Filter it, sort it, and follow any citation back to the source.
1529 checked at source
Filter the collection
Category
Feeling
Attribution
152
Uncertainty gives fear a chance to get in its deadly work on the imagination and make cowards of us.
153
Every person who amounts to anything feels within himself a power which is ever pushing him on and urging him to perpetual improvement.
154
It is the hopeful, buoyant, cheerful attitude of mind that wins.
155
Optimism is a success builder; pessimism an achievement killer.
156
All our limitations are in our own minds, the supply is there waiting in vast abundance.
157
No one can pursue a worthy object steadily and persistently with all the powers of his mind, and yet make his life a failure.
158
Great tenacity of purpose is the only thing that will carry you over the hard places which appear in every career to ultimate triumph.
159
Success is the child of two very plain parents--punctuality and accuracy.
160
The present time is the raw material out of which we make whatever we will.
161
Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.
162
Success is jealous of scattered energies.
163
The result of it all may be summed up in his favourite motto, “Be kind, for every one is fighting a hard battle.”
Platomisattributed·“Ian Maclaren”: The Life of the Rev. John Watson, D.D., by W. Robertson Nicoll·1908
Wrongly attributed
Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.
164
The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be.
165
This joy of life, this joy of work, in man is absolutely true.
166
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide
167
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
168
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
169
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best
170
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
171
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
172
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emersonmisattributed·Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers, by Muriel Strode, in The Open Court, Volume XVII, Number 567·August 1903
Wrongly attributed
Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.
173
The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
174
Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.
175
If you’re going to do a job, do it right.