Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Progress
& Success
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with
problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
-
Arthur C. Clarke's three
"laws" of prediction: (1) When a distinguished but
elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost
certainly right. When he states that something
is impossible, he is very probably wrong. (2) The only way
of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little
way past them into the impossible. (3) Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Martin Luther King,
Jr.: “Faith is taking the first
step even when you don't see the whole staircase.” [Editor’s note: Someone said that one can drive from NY to
LA without being able to see more than 200 feet ahead of oneself
at any given time; but keep on invading that 200 feet and the trip
will be completed.]
- George Orwell, 1984: "You will have to get used to
living without results and without hope. You will work for awhile, you will be caught, you
will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see.
There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime.
We are dead. Our only true life is in the future."
- Alexander Graham Bell: "When one door closes another opens.
But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the
one that has opened for us."
- Robert Browning: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his
grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
- Confucious (551 - 479 BC): "Our greatest glory is not in
never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
- Albert Einstein: "The important thing is not to stop
questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when
he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never
lose a holy curiosity."
- Albert Einstein: "A problem cannot be solved on the
same level that it was created."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Do not go where the path may lead; go
instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
- Kahlil Gibran: "To understand the heart and mind of a
person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to."
- Goethe: "Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They
may be beaten, but they may start a winning game."
- Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one
elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that
the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things
occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues
from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings
and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned
a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever
you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.
W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
- Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith: "Security is
mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole
experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave
like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."
- Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the
only thing that ever has."
- George Bernard Shaw: "You see things and say Why? But
I dream things that never were and say Why Not?" "The reasonable
man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the
world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- from the book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a poem, Autobiography
in Five Chapters:
1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost... I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in... it's a habit
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
5) I walk down another street.
- Henry David Thoreau: "We must walk consciously only part
way toward our goal, and then leap in the darkness to our success."
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait
till that other is ready."
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured and far
away."
- Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more
disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So
throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your
sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Lau Tze: "A thousand mile journey begins with one
step."
- Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on
the shoulders of giants."
- Hal
Abelson: “If
I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my
shoulders.”
- Abraham Lincoln, letter to Horace Greeley, 1862:
"I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views
so fast as they shall appear to be true views."
- President
Ronald Reagan, Jan. 28, 1986, addressing the nation after the space shuttle Challenger
explosion: "I want to say something to the school children of America
who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take off. I know it's hard to
understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of
exploration and discovery; it's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons.
The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave."
- President
Ronald Reagan, Jan. 11, 1989, final address to the nation from the Oval Office: "Once
you begin a great movement there's no telling where it will end; we meant to change a
nation and instead we changed a world..."
- Martin
Luther King, Jr.: "If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should
sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare
wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will
pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well."
- Alberta Lee Cox: "It's not enough to be good if you have the ability
to be better."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy: "Change is the law. And those who look only
to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
- Chinese Proverb: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and
I understand."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955): "Great spirits have always encountered
violent opposition from mediocre minds."
- Galvani, discoverer of electricity:
"I am attacked by two very opposite sects -- the scientists and the
know-nothings. Both laugh at me, calling me 'the frogs' dancing master.' Yet I know I have
discovered one of the greatest forces in nature."
- C. G. Jung, psychologist, a lecture to
the Society of Psychic Research, Collected Works, Vol. 8, 317: "I
shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a
fraud."
- William
James:
"The greatest discovery of my generation, is that a
human being can alter his life, by altering his attitude."
- Mohandas
Ghandi:
“Earth
provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
- John Barrymore: "A
man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."
- Confucius (551-479 BC): "It does not matter how slowly you go, so
long as you do not stop."
- Vince Lombardi (1913-1970): "It s not whether you get knocked down.
It s whether you get up again."
- Mother
Teresa:
"God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try."
- Mark
Twain:
"All you need in life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."
- Harriet
Woods: "You
can be a victor without having victims."
- Alexander
Graham Bell (1847-1922): "When
one door closes, another door opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the
closed door, that we do not see the ones which opened for us."
- Johnny Hart: "Cutting the space budget really restores my
faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926): "When great changes occur in
history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The
minority are right."
- Alfred North Whitehead: "Fundamental progress has to do with
the reinterpretation of basic ideas."
- Johann von Schiller: "Keep true to the dreams of thy
youth."
- Werner Von Braun: "I have learned to use the word impossible
with the greatest caution."
- E. Jean Carroll: "To achieve the marvelous, you must do the
unthinkable. . . the answer will hit, like a big psychic orgasm, if you listen to your
dreams. They never lie."
- Mike Huber on Techwr-L: "I never, ever say I can't
about anything. I might say I don't have the authority to make that decision or Building
A is too heavy for me to lift or I will need training before I pilot that space
shuttle."
- W.H. Murray: "The moment one definitely commits oneself
then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never
otherwise have occurred."
- Dick Sutphen: "Most people diffuse their psychic energy
(attention) in hundreds of random ways. Those who flow focus their psychic energy
intentionally upon the task at hand. It really boils down to knowing your goal,
concentrating upon it, remaining determined and having the self-discipline to complete
what you are doing."
- Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:
"The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people
are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is
so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost , for the sheer sake of doing
it."
- Stewart B. Johnson: "Our business in life is not to get
ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves -- to break our own records, to outstrip
our yesterday by our today."
- Aldous
Huxley: "If
we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had
to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love,
fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he
was superb."
- Ransom
K. Ferm: "With
every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular
cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to
insist that there is no such thing as progress."
- George
Bernard Shaw: "The
reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the
world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- Albert
Einstein: "My
intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space
and time only when I had already grown up."
- Michelangelo: "Lord, grant that I may always desire more
than I can accomplish."
- D'Angelo, Anthony: "The people
who oppose your ideas the most are those who represent the establishment that your ideas
will upset."
- Leonardo da Vinci: "For once you have tasted flight you
will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you
will long to return."
- Robyn Davidson: "The most difficult
thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper
tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life;
and the procedure , the process is its own reward... The two important things I did learn
were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most
difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first
decision."
- Marquise du Deffand: "The distance is
nothing; it's only the first step that is difficult."
- Belva Davis: "Don't be afraid of the
space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so."
- Gerald Horton Bath: "We ought to spend more time 'wondering' than
'doubting whether.' Wondering is the key to progress."
- Alfred North Whitehead: "Fundamental progress has to do with the
reinterpretation of basic ideas."
- Denis Waitley: "Don't dwell on what went wrong. Instead,
focus on what to do next. Spend your energies on moving forward toward finding the
answer."
- Arthur Schopenhauer: "All truth passes through three
stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third,
it is accepted as being self-evident."
- Henry Ford: "Failure is the opportunity to begin something
again more intelligently."
- Auguste Rodin: "Nothing is a waste of time if you use the
experience wisely."
- Psalm 37: 1, 3-5, 7-8, 11: "Fret not thyself... Trust in
the Lord, and do good... Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he
shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord;
trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass... Rest in the Lord, and
wait patiently for him: fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because
of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret
not thyself in any wise to do evil... the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight
themselves in the abundance of peace."
- Psalm 16: 11: "... at thy right hand there are pleasures
for evermore."
- William James: "I am done with great things and big plans,
great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human
forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of
the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given
time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."
- Unknown: "You are successful the moment you start
moving toward a worthwhile goal."
- Lady Margaret Thatcher: in a speech delivered 2-19-01, quoting
her Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, as he addressed the new class in 1944 during
WWII: "All beginnings are hopeful."
- Unknown: "The richness and variety, and
indeed the advance, of our culture depend upon the continuation of this conflict [between
conservatives and radicals], which is deeply rooted in human nature."
- Martin
Luther King, Jr.: "Take the first step in faith. You don't have
to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step."
- Michelangelo: "If people knew how hard I work to get my
mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all."
- Warren Buffett: "If you can tell me who your heroes are, I
can tell you how you're going to turn out in life."
- George Washington, Letter of Instructions to the Captains of Virginia
Regiments, 1759: "Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small
numbers formidable, procures success to the weak, and esteem to all."
- Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House, 1885: "One, with God, is
always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were
being counted."
- Groucho Marx: "Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful
message to me and many of my young friends -- that if you worked hard at your
trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn't regard it as a
myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life."
- Stefan Kanfer on Horatio Alger: "Horatio
Alger Jr. was the biggest American media star of his day. Though nineteenth-century
best-seller lists were impressionistic—and the sale of 10,000 volumes was deemed a
publishing triumph in those days—readers bought at least 200 million copies of his
books, placing him in the Stephen King category... Alger was at the forefront of a
phenomenally successful experiment in social reform and improvement, a broad movement that
inspired poor kids to take advantage of America's social mobility and that led tens of
thousands of New York's post-Civil War juvenile delinquents into productive lives. Those
who care about the future of the city's poor should re-examine Alger's message: it worked
once, and could work again... Why, Alger pondered, did individuals subjected to the same
conditions turn out very differently? One boy might become a thief, a sociopath, even a
killer. His neighbor, subjected to the same poverty and broken home, might aim to be a
decent, upright citizen. What was the difference between them? What saved certain boys, he
came to believe, was character—a quality that gave them the strength to resist
sloth and temptation. But was this inborn? In that case determinism won the day, and
change was out of the question. Or, given the right opportunity, could a dispossessed lad
win his share of the American dream simply by willing the change? The latter, Alger
thought—but only if the boy stopped viewing himself as a victim and
instead sought the proper advice... Horatio came to tutor Benjamin Cardozo, later a
Supreme Court justice. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that many of the moral
lessons Cardozo learned as an apt pupil were to affect his decisions on the bench... The
influence Alger had on American youth was incalculable. Men as different as journalist
Heywood Broun, comedian Groucho Marx, and novelist Ernest Hemingway were fans. To Broun,
Alger's books were inspiring, 'simple tales of honesty triumphant.' Marx remarked,
'Horatio Alger's books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young
friends—that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come.
As a child I didn't regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of
my life.' Hemingway's sister Marcelline recalled that during their childhood, 'There was
one summer when Ernest couldn't get enough of Horatio Alger.' Not that Alger's didacticism
influenced Papa's prose style. But there must have been something in the writer's stress
on grit and self-reliance that affected young Ernest, as it did so many of his
contemporaries... Browsing the Internet one afternoon, I found many old and well-read
Horatio Alger novels for sale, most priced under $15. Some weeks later, I began reading
the novels aloud to my children. We found them well-plotted, entertaining, and
instructive, not at all the righteous antiques that I had been led to believe. Almost
every chapter ends with a cliff-hanger, and all of us could hardly wait for the next night
to find out what happened. The conclusions never failed to produce an emotional
satisfaction and a feeling that what the author was selling—independence,
forbearance, square dealing—was well worth buying. In the Clinton era, when shame and
remorse have almost lost their meaning, the turnaround of Horatio Alger's personal life is
instructive, and the message of his work invaluable."
- Star Wars: The Empire Srikes Back: Luke Skywalker:
"All right. I'll give it a try." Yoda: "No! Try not. Do. Or do
not. There is no try."
- Robert Goddard, physicist: "Just
remember -- when you think all is lost, the future remains."
- Disraeli: "Success is the child of audacity."
- Rev. Endicott Peabody, headmaster, Groton: Quoted by his former
student, FDR, in his last inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1945: "Things in life will not
always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights -- then all will seem
to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is
that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the
middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend."
- Professor C.J. Ducasse: "Assertions of impossibility are
based on the metaphysical creeds of the scientists of the day."
- Andrew Carnegie: "Think of yourself as on the threshold of
unparalleled success. A whole clear, glorious life lies before you. Achieve!
Achieve!"
- Vince Lombardi, Green Bay Packers: "Your success in life
will be determined more by the depth of your commitment to excellence than by any other
factor."
- Howard Whitman, Success Is Within You: "...
success has the intrinsic character of a batting average... a
successful life will have its days or even years of failure. It will certainly have
its moments of utter washout. These are not blights upon such a life but merely the
inevitable failings which bear testimony to the fact that success isn't easy."
- Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live!: published in 1936,
during the dark days of the Great Depression, Brande eloquently preaches to a nation
drowning in self-pity: "... the Will to Fail, the Will to Death... Nature prepares us
for each new phase of life by closing off old desires [and death at the end of a good life
is a natural example of this]... But when it appears in youth or full maturity it is as
symptomatic of something wrong... Most of us disguise our failure in public... most
successfully from ourselves... we seem silently to enter into a sort of gentleman's
agreement with our friends... 'Don't mention my failure to me [and I will do the same for
you]'... So we slip through the world without making our
contribution, without discovering all that there was in us to do... All those in
the grip of the Will to Fail act as if they had a thousand years before them... the
solitaire-players, the pathological bookworms, the endless crossword puzzlers... the line
between recreation and obsession is not hard to see... [ones] crying that one must
have recreation give themselves dead away as setting an abnormal value on release... [the]
aimless conversationalists... the Universal Charmers. When you find yourself in the
presence of more charm than the situation calls for, you are safe in saying to yourself,
'Ah, a failure!' ... [one] who insists on being accepted as just a great, big, delightful
child... so exceedingly lovable, even to strangers... A healthy adult does not need the
tenderness or indulgence of every casual acquaintance... they must go on being more and
more charming... or face the truth -- admit that they have not adequately discharged their
responsibilities... a falsely purposeful routine [represents]
activities [which] are only apparently purposeless. There is in every case a deep
intention, which may be stated in many ways. We may say that
the most obvious intention is to beguile the world into believing that we are living up to
our fullest capacity... In the long run in makes little difference how cleverly others are
deceived; if we are not doing what we are best equipped to do ... there will be a core of
unhappiness in our lives which will be more and more difficult to ignore as the years
pass... these victims present a dreadful spectacle... insane misers, stuffing a senseless
accumulation of trash, odds and ends of sensations, experiences, fads and enthusiasms,
synthetic emotions, into the priceless coffer of their one irreplaceable lifetime.
Whatever the ostensible purpose may be, it is plain that one motive is at work in all
these cases: the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary
activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform
the best work of which one is capable. The intention, in
short, is to fail."
- author unknown: "If you want something in your life that
you never had, you must do something that you have never done."
- The Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary
project, all your thoughts break their bounds. Your mind transcends limitations, your
consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great wonderful
world.”
- Emerson: "No one can cheat you out of
your ultimate success but yourself."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Hester, chiding her dispirited lover:
"Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to
such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a
scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die! Give up
this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high
one..."
- Abigail Adams: To her husband, John: "You
cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator ... We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond
with them."
- Sir Isaiah Berlin, Winston Churchill in 1940:
"Churchill ... does not fear the future... But whereas Roosevelt, like all great
innovators, had a half-conscious premonitory awareness of the coming shape of a society
... Churchill, for all his extrovert air, looks within, and his
strongest sense is the sense of the past... The clear, brightly coloured vision of
history, in terms which he conceived both the present and the future, is the
inexhaustible source from which he draws the primary stuff out of which his universe is so
solidly built, so richly and elaborately ornamented. So firm and so embracing an edifice
could not be constructed by anyone liable to react and respond like a sensitive instrument
to the perpetually changing moods and directions of other persons or institutions or
peoples. And, indeed, Churchill's strength ... he does not reflect a
contemporary social or moral world in an intense and concentrated fashion; rather he
creates one of such power and coherence that it becomes reality and alters the external
world by being imposed on it with irresistible force. As his history of the war
shows, he has an immense capacity for absorbing facts, but they
emerge transformed by the categories which he powerfully imposes on the raw material into
something which he can use to build his own massive, simply, impregnably fortified inner
world..."
- Unknown:
"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark.
Professionals built the Titanic."
- Alexis de Tocqueville:
"I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory
as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step
toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all."
- Charles Van Doren: "With all its stress, anxiety, and threat of
dangers never before known, it is modern life that is simpler and
easier, not the life of the past."
-
Maxwell Maltz, The Search
For Self-Respect: "What is opportunity, and when
does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime ...
and you will hear no knocking... You are opportunity, and
you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare
yourself to recognize opportunity ... as you develop the strength
of your personality."
-
- "Just remember -- when you think all is lost, the future
remains."
Robert Goddard, physicist
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