“No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
- Herbert Spencer
“I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.”
Learn more about Solitude and Leadership.
Aaron Swartz is putting togther some interesting essays on; getting better at life.
All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor”. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.
- Muhammad Yunus
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
- Mark Twain
If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.
- Don Herold
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen.
- James Russel Lowell
People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross.
- Unknown
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.
- Edgar Watson Howe
How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.
- Thomas Jefferson
There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.
- Josh Billings
There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.
- Seneca
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
- Michel de Montaigne
Full soon in deepest hearts care finds a nest,
And builds her bed of pain, in secret still,
There rocks herself, disturbing joy and rest,
And ever takes new shapes to work her will,
With fluttering fears for home or wife or child,
A thought of poison, flood, or perils wild;
For man must quail at bridges never crossed,
Lamenting even things he never lost.
- Goethe, Faust
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word ‘habit’, in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,— practical, emotional, and intellectual,— systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
- William James
“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements.”
- Nikola Tesla
“He who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
- Alexander Hamilton
