Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
― Aristotle

“Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”
― Moliere

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“The only easy day was yesterday.”
― US Navy SEALs

“First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.”
― Epictetus

“Everything is hard before it is easy”
― Goethe J.W.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
― Confucius, Confucius: The Analects

“God sells us all things at the price of labor.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus”
― Alexander Graham Bell

“Tis in ourselves that we are thus
or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which
our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up
thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or
distract it with many, either to have it sterile
with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the
power and corrigible authority of this lies in our
wills. If the balance of our lives had not one
scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the
blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us
to most preposterous conclusions: but we have
reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal
stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that
you call love to be a sect or scion.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“Time stays long enough for those who use it.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“You may delay, but time will not.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“A Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:

1. Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.

2. Never trouble another with what you can do yourself.

3. Never spend your money before you have it.

4. Never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap, it will be dear to you.

5. Take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves.

6. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.

7. We never repent of having eat too little.

8. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.

9. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

10. Take things always by their smooth handle.

11. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes.

12. When angry, count 10. before you speak; if very angry, 100.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
― Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding...

{Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823}”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson