The Stronger Base

A decision is made with the brain. A commitment is made with the heart. Therefore, a commitment is much deeper and more binding than a decision.

- Nido Qubein

The Highest Ethic

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

- Thomas Edison

The Difference

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

- Pete Seeger

Teachers

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

- William Arthur Ward

Followers

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

- Christian Nevell Bovee

Moving Forward

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

- Brian Tracy

Mistakes

If you have made mistakes...there is always another chance for you...you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

- Mary Pickford

The Greatest Masterpiece

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

- Michel Eyquem de Montaign

Character

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the alters of conformity and popularity.

- William Arthur Ward

Security

The search for static security - in the law and elsewhere - is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts.

- William O. Douglas

Success

Success has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

- Danny Thomas

Fullness of Life

Everything that is full of life loves change, for the characteristic of life is movement toward a new goal, and urges toward new pleasures.

- Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979)

Life Stages

You know your children have grown up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they are going.

- Jim McQain

Responsibility

One of the annoying things about believing in free choice and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

- P.J. O'Rourke

Environment

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

-William R. Inge, clergyman, scholar, and author (1860-1954)

Possibilities

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

- Horace Walpole, novelist and essayist (1717-1797)

Happiness

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Success

You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things - to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.

- Sir Edmund Hillary

A Daily Gift

One ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Freedom

Freedom's enemies are waste, lethargy, indifference, immorality, and the insidious attitude of something for nothing.

- William Arthur Ward

New Ideas

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

- William James (1842-1920)

Work

The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.

- Charles M. Schwab

Struggle

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

- Sir William Osler

Life Value

When you're in your 90s and looking back, it's not going to be how much money you made or how many awards you've won. It's really "What did you stand for? Did you make a positive difference for people?"

- Elizabeth Dole

Instinct

The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.

- Voltaire

Life

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

- Agatha Christie

Identity

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Connections

Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.

- Charles Dickens

Wisdom

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

- Akhenaton

Leadership

To act and act wisely when the time for action comes, to wait and wait patiently when it is time for repose, put man in accord with the rising and falling tides (of affairs), so that with nature and law at his back, and truth and beneficence as his beacon light, he may accomplish wonders. Ignorance of this law results in periods of unreasoning enthusiasm on the one hand, and depression on the other. Man thus becomes the victim of the tides when he should be their master.

- Helena Petrova Blavatsky