Quotation Collection

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Aristotle

• practice
• education

Whatever you did in the past may well have been a mistake. If you become convinced it is, clinging to it just repeats the mistake and compounds it. Put it behind you - even if it was a career you spent decades developing. All that matters when it comes to decisions is your current goal and the best way to get there from here and now. John T. Reed

• goals
• mistakes

This is the source.

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense. Steve Landesberg

• honesty
• funny

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• genius

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. 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. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• work
• imitation
• effort

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• uniqueness
• self reliance

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• uniqueness

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• independence

Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• candor

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? Ralph Waldo Emerson

• speech

Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• power
• self sufficiency

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more but thank and revere him;—and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• self sufficiency
• job
• self reliance

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• imitation

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• purpose

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• purpose

The reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• self reliance
• self sufficiency

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• cause and effect

Men suffer all their life long under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer The payment is withholden, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer. Ralph Waldo Emerson

• service

It is much more gratifying to say "I did that" than "I paid for that." Jacob Fisker

• experience