The quote database

If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line.

The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it.

We do our best when our destinations are beyond the “measurement,” when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, when we have immortal finish lines.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease: but men do not always take the right way.

Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?

It is doubtful whether a person could be a failure while engaged in work which he liked best.

This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being, and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of the race.

The past material conditions of life have gone for ever; no will of man can recall them.

Give us labour and the training which fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for the race.

That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.

For equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.

The ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive.

We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less.

Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price, and it is yours.

Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Great tenacity of purpose is the only thing that will carry you over the hard places which appear in every career to ultimate triumph.

Success is the child of two very plain parents--punctuality and accuracy.

In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.

Self-love is mainly to blame, making people fond of being first and aspiring in all matters, and insatiably desirous to engage in everything.

it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker