"A meeting is an occasion when people gather together, some
to say what they do not think, and others not to say what
they really do."
--Vladimir Voinovich
"To get something done a committee should consist of no more
than three men, two of whom are absent."
--Robert Copeland
"You'll find in no park or city/A monument to a committee."
--Victoria Pasternack
"The ability to concentrate and use your time well is
everything."
--Lee Iacocca
"Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be
afraid."
--Lady Bird Johnson
"It is only when doing my work that I feel truly alive."
--Federico Fellini
Never forget two of the most powerful words in the English
language: "asif":
"Act as if it were impossible to fail."
--Dorothea Brande
"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it."
--William James
"Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make
you happy."
--Dale Carnegie
"Sweat plus sacrifice equals success."
--Charles O. Finley
"The superior man is modest in his speech, but excels in his
actions."
--Confucius
"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand
and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into
flying."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
Go with your gut feelings:
"Instinct is the nose of the mind."
--Madame de Girardin
"Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a
loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual
deadness."
--Shakti Gawain
"It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can
lead a rich life."
--Katharine Butler Hathaway
"Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of
bad training."
--Anna Freud
"Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every
day; wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit."
--Elbert Hubbard
"Love they neighbor as thyself, but choose your
neighborhood."
--Louise Beal
Bounce back:
"When you're a professional, you come back no matter what
happened the day before."
--Billy Martin
"To be happy, drop the words 'if only' and substitute instead
the words 'next time'."
--Dr. Smiley Blanton
"Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in
rising every time we fall."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I don't believe in failure. It's not failure if you enjoyed
the process."
--Oprah Winfrey
"I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the
doctrine of the strenuous life."
--Theodore Roosevelt
"You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you
would like them to go."
--Jeannette Rankin
Think twice before you ask for or offer advice:
"Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most
always like it the least."
--Earl of Chesterfield
"Who cannot give good counsel? 'Tis cheap, it costs them
nothing."
--Robert Burton
"Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their
breath."
--John Updike
"I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it,
and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something
else: hard work - and realizing what is opportunity and what
isn't."
--Lucille Ball
"Let us, then, be up and doing. / With a heart for any fate;
/ Still achieving, still pursuing. / Learn to labor and to
wait."
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could
anything be more fun?"
--Katharine Graham
Aim for the top in all things:
"There is always room at the top."
--Daniel Webster
"I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest."
--John Keats
"Every soldier carries a marshall's baton in his pack."
Napoleon
"The ultimate of being successful is the luxury of giving
yourself the time to do what you want to do."
--Leontyne Price
"Learning is discovering that something is possible."
--Fritz Perls
"Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as
her youth fades. A mode of conduct, a standard of courage,
discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to
make a woman beautiful."
--Jacqueline Bisset
Make up your mind:
"There is always a multitude of reasons both in favor of
doing a thing and against doing it. The art of debate lies
in presenting them; the art of life lies in neglecting
ninety-nine hundredths of them."
--Mark Rutherford
"No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not
start. It becomes a nightmare."
--Baudeliare
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the
road. They get run over."
--Anuerin Bevan
"Attempt the impossible in order to improve you work."
--Bette Davis
"If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to
achieve prodigies."
--H. L. Mencken
"Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be
denied."
--Millicent G. Fawcett
Don't mistake a spreadsheet projection for a crystal ball:
"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look
farther than you can see."
Winston Churchill
"You cannot plan the future by the past."
--Edmund Burke
"Oh! that a man might know / The end of this day's business
ere it come."
--Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)
"The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy
meditations on the past."
--André Maurois
"Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in
thyself."
--Felix Adler
"It's going to be a long hard drag, but we'll make it."
--Janis Joplin
Wait them (it) out:
"The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by
hatching the egg - not by smashing it."
--Arnold Glasow
"Patience and perseverance at length / Accomplish more than
anger or brute strength."
--Jean de La Fontaine
"Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to
wrath."
--The Bible, James I: 19
"Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your
secret reveries that you were born to control affairs."
--Andrew Carnegie
"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
--Ingrid Bergman
"Lost time is never found again."
--Benjamin Franklin
Hang on:
"The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to
last in it, and not be smashed by it."
--Ernest Hemingway
"I bend, but I do not break."
--Jean de La Fontaine
"To be somebody you must last."
--Ruth Gordon
"The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful
is the interest the old personality can take in new
activities."
--Cesare Pavese
"A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself."
--Axel Munthe
"The real tragedy of life is not being limited to one talent,
but in failing to use that one talent."
--Edgar Watson Howe
Don't lust after fame - it's overrated:
"Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a
burden it was or what freedom really is."
--Margaret Mitchell
"Being a personality is not the same thing as having a
personality."
--Alan Coren
"It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part
with their brightest hour."
-- Lillian Hellman
"There is a passion for perfection which you rarely see fully
developed but . . . in successful lives it is never wholly
lacking."
--Bliss Carmen
"If you count all your assets, you always show a profit."
--Robert Quillen
"And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily."
--Col. 3:23
Don't be fooled by appearances:
"It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds."
--Aesop
"Judge not according to the appearance."
--John 7: 24
"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."
--Sophia Loren
"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing
can be done without hope and confidence."
--Helen Keller
"Enthusiasm for one's goal lessens the disagreeableness of
working toward it."
--Thomas Eakins
"Fear nothing, for every renewed effort raises all former
failures into lessons, all sins into experience."
--Katherine Tingley
Learn how to speak in public:
"A speech is a solemn responsibility. The man who makes a bad
thirty-minute speech to two hundred people wastes only a half hour of
his own time. But he wastes one hundred hours of the audience's time -
more than four days - which should be a hanging offense."
--Jenkin Lloyd Jones
"If you haven't struck oil in your first three minutes, stop boring."
--George Jessel
"My father gave me these hints on speech-making: Be sincere . . . be
brief . . . be seated."
--James Roosevelt
"It's never too late -in fiction or in life - to revise."
--Nancy Thayer
"Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a
nation."
--Oscar Wilde
"The one important thing I have learned over the years is the
difference between taking one's work seriously and taking
one's self seriously. The first is imperative, and the
second is disastrous."
--Margaret Fontey
Get off on the right foot:
"Distance doesn't matter; it's only the first step that is
difficult."
--Marquise du Delfand
"The first blow is half the battle."
--Oliver Goldsmith