Quote Collection

Picking up on Christopher S Penn's suggestion to include a quote page, I decided that it was a good idea. I have long collected quoted. I share good ones I find in my email signature at work. I haven't done that with Google Mail yet, but there is no reason not to.

This collection will grow as I relocate those I have here from my other source files.

This collection will also grow organically as I find new ones. I'll try to put the news ones on top to make it easier for you to check in and see what's been happening.

Here is my collection of quotes:


"Coming together is a beginning
keeping together is progress
working together is success"

Henry Ford

"Every man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds... Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

"The Seven-step Path to Sustaining Success
You take care of the people.
The people take care of the service.
The service takes care of the customer.
The customer takes care of the profit.
The profit takes care of the re-investment.
The re-investment takes care of the re-invention.
The re-invention takes care of the future.
(And at every step the only measure is EXCELLENCE.)" Tom Peters

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity" Horace Mann

“Some people think that friends have to be equals in everything -- in other words, what I get from you must be equal to what you get from me. Friendship depends on what you give to each other, not what you get from each other. You cannot base a friendship on illusions. I express my friendship equation this way: My ambition as your friend is that my friendship has a positive influence on your quality of life. If I am able to accomplish that, it will enhance my quality of life.” Bill Russell

"The chicken is involved in a ham-and-eggs breakfast, but the pig is truly committed." Roy H Williams

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” Plutarch

"Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful." - Erickson

"You can stay young as long as you learn." - Emily Dickinson

"Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe."
– Tom Robbins

"The mind is like a parachute it works best when opened" attributed to Charlie Chaplin, Frank Zappa and Sir Thomas Robert Dewar

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life... and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." - William Faulkner

"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 each day. Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein

" ... we should all probably calm down about politics. Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore." David Brooks

"We attend too many seminars. We take too many classes. We buy too many books. We play too many audios in our cars. It's all wasted if we're unclear on what learning really is: Learning is not attending, listening or reading. Nor is it merely gaining knowledge. Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. It is about changing. If we have not changed we have not learned. What have you learned today?" - John G. Miller

“Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.” Deborah Loewenberg Ball

“I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.”  Ellen Goodman

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, 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 street sweeper who did his job well.’”  Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Over time the needs of the people you serve become your stake in the challenges of our time. Because, in the end, service binds us to each other, and to our community and to our country in a way that nothing else can…"  Barack Obama

“Why worry about being a nobody when what matters is being a somebody in those areas of your life over which you have control, and in which you can make a difference?” Epictetus

"In a world where the infrastructure continues to advance exponentially. We need to shift from learning-to-be to learning-to-become over and over again. And being able to regrind our conceptual lens."  John Seeley Brown

"Today, it is not important to measure what our children can be taught.  In stead, we should figure out how to measure what they can gain through their growing skills of learning, curiosity, resourcefulness, and caring - and what they can do with what they've learned. The world has become more cooperative, not competitive.  The world has become a lot more interesting..."  David Warlick

“People do not live by bread alone. They need buttering up every once in a while.”  Robert Henry

"The chances that you can top a trusted provider on the very thing the provider is trusted for are slim indeed. Instead, you gain converts by winning at something the existing provider didn't think was so important." -- Seth Godin

"Celebrate small victories often. Mourn failures quickly. Do what's necessary without fanfare." -- Chris Brogan

"Our example to our children, to our families, and to the world around us is constant. The question is not whether or not anyone is watching, the question is what are they learning as they watch." --  Kirk Weisler

“A knowledge of truth is of little value unless we apply it by making right choices” -- Rebecca Weisler

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” -- Benjamin Disraeli

"If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." -- Benjamin Franklin

"Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest". -- Mark Twain

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." -- Helen Keller

''Think as you work--for in the final analysis, your worth to your company comes not only in solving problems, but also in anticipating them.'' -- Tom Lehrer

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts." -- John Locke

"We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds." -- Aristotle Onassis

"There are only two things of importance. One is the customer, and the other is the product. If you take care of customers, they come back. If you take care of your product, it doesn't come back. It's just that simple. And it's just that difficult." -- Stanley Marcus

"What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are." -- Tony Robbins

"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing." -- Mother Teresa

"If you would taste truth and beauty and grace, you must reach for the fruit of a tree planted deep in the soil of irrational commitment." Roy H Williams

"One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others." -- Lewis Carol

“Words are living things for they are filled with the breath of life. Giving them the power to create or to destroy, to give life or to take it away.” -- Kate Maxwell Stephens

"The goal of life is to take everything that made you weird as a kid and get people to pay you money for it when you're older." -- David Freeman

"Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb." -- Sir Winston Churchill

"Faith is believing that one of two things might happen, she said, that there will be something solid for you to stand on or that you will be taught to fly." -- unknown

"It seems to me, she said, that we only really see something when we allow ourselves a different point of view." -- same unknown reference as above

"Everything in the universe is connected, of course. It's a matter of using imagination to discover the links, and language to expand and enliven them." -- Tom Robbins

"With computers, the answer is always yes or no. My job is to figure out how to ask the question." -- Andy Shook

"The thing is, we still live in a world that's filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity -- we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing."-- Seth Godin

''They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.''  -- Benjamin Franklin

"You need to take a hold of your destiny, or someone else will." -- Author Unknown

"Cheerfulness at the workplace has nothing to do with function and everything to do with purpose. We get what we think." -- Author Unknown 

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."   Edward Abbey

“The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.” Elizabeth Gilbert

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." Frank A Clark

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places." Ernest Hemingway  A Farewell to Arms

"Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do" Steve Farber

"it is our choices, Harry, that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  Dumbledore (J. K. Rowling) to Harry in "Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets"

"Nothing but uncertainty is certain. Circumstances come together, only to fall apart moments or months later. And then, in a flash, we must rise up and regain our footing. In the rearview mirror, I now see so clearly what escaped me then: It's not that the ground underneath me was suddenly shifting; it's that it is never still. That's part of the work of my journey—getting comfortable with life's groundlessness."  "More Myself: A Journey" by Alicia Keys

“Know the essence of what you want, but don’t put a form on it.” Rhiannon Giddens' mother's  advice to her

"If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." African proverb

“Public senti­ment is everything. With public senti­ment, noth­ing can fail; without it, noth­ing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public senti­ment goes deeper than he who enacts stat­utes or pronounces decisions. He makes stat­utes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”  Abraham Lincoln

“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.”  Dacher Keltner

"What becomes of me has never seemed to me important, but the fates of ideas living against the grain in a nondescript world have always held me breathless."  William Carlos Williams 

“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”  e e cummings