Motivational Quotes

'Where Do We Go From Here?" as published in Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967), p. 62; many statements in this book, or slight variants of them, were also part of his address Where Do We Go From Here?" which has a section below. A common variant appearing at least as early as 1968 has "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence..." An early version of the speech as published in A Martin Luther King Treasury (1964), p. 173, has : "Returning hate for hate multiplies hate..."
1960s
Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
Context: The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. … Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Source: Meditations

Georges Duhamel in THE HEART'S DOMAIN (1919). As it was composed in French, the wording in English may vary in translation. Theodore Geisel / Dr. Seuss was born in 1904, and would have been about 15 years old at the time that it was published. The full text can be found at the link below: We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on color; and only then, after that recoil and that trans-figuration, do we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil splendor.
Misattributed

Variant: When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

Source: Jordan, Michael. I Can't Accept Not Trying : Michael Jordan on the Pursuit of Excellence. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994. p. 129
Context: I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying [no hard work].
Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. (p. 20, 24)

Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870)
Variant: Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Source: The Ladies' Paradise

Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 29–30
Context: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.

Posthumous attributions, Tupac: Resurrection (2003)

Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)

Variant: Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, and others make it happen.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Context: With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

This is actually a quotation http://books.google.com/books?id=FUIHmRHf8SUC&amp;lpg=PA130&amp;dq=%22not%20on%20fighting%20the%20old%20but%20on%20building%20the%20new%22&amp;pg=PA130#v=onepage&amp;q=%22not%20on%20fighting%20the%20old%20but%20on%20building%20the%20new%22&amp;f=false from a character named Socrates in Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book that Changes Lives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_of_the_Peaceful_Warrior, by Dan Millman. <br class="br">Misattributed

As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v

Source: Quoted in Man's Search for Meaning and attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.

We Bereaved (1929)

Shared on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MayaAngelou/posts/10150251846629796, July 4, 2011

As quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973) by Melvin A. Benarde, p. v
Context: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Variant: Be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud.
Source: Letter to My Daughter

Source: The Lorax (1972)

Mildred Pierce

As quoted in Business Etiquette for the Nineties : Your Ticket to Career Success (1992) by Lou Kennedy, p. 8
Variant: Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.

Source: Hamlet, Act III, scene i.

Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930), as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), p. 367
1930s

Source: Doctor Sleep

Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
Source: Think and Grow Rich (1938), p. 127

Reported in Patti Denys, Mary Holmes, Animal Magnetism: At Home With Celebrities & Their Animal Companions (1998), p. 106
Source: Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe

Variant: You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

Source: Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/shigeru-miyamoto-interview Eurogamer.net, published on 31 March 2010

Attributed quotes

Variant: Do not wait: the time will never be 'just right'. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.
Source: Think and Grow Rich (1938), p. 127
Context: Do not wait; the time will never be "just right." Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

Variant: Today is your day, your mountain is waiting. So get on your way.

Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
Context: It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.
Context: It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, — it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small. Let us believe it, then, once for all, that there is no hope for us in these smooth pleasing writers that know their powers.

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

Ch. IX : Outdoors and Indoors, p. 336; the final statement "quoted by Squire Bill Widener" as well as variants of it, are often misattributed to Roosevelt himself.
Variant: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Attributed to Roosevelt in Conquering an Enemy Called Average (1996) by John L. Mason, Nugget # 8 : The Only Place to Start is Where You Are. <!-- The Military Quotation Book, Revised and Expanded: More than 1,200 of the Best Quotations About War, Leadership, Courage, Victory, and Defeat (2002) by James Charlton -->
Variant: Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.
Context: There are many kinds of success in life worth having. It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison. It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching. And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end — why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing. There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in life: "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."

Source: Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

Frequently attributed to Nin, but without cited source in her work (possibly due to a quotation in Living on Purpose: Straight Answers to Universal Questions (2000) by Dan Millman that attributed the quote to Nin without source).
In March 2013, a former Director of Public Relations at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Elizabeth Appell, claimed she had authored the quote in 1979 for an inspirational header on a class schedule: http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/2013/03/who-wrote-risk-is-the-mystery-solved/
Disputed
Variant: The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Source: Pygmalion

Source: Confucius: The Analects

Source: The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt

From a 1982 interview with Boston Globe journalist Marian Christy. Christy, Marian. &quot;Winning according to Schwarzenegger.&quot; https://secure.pqarchiver.com/boston/doc/294151457.html Boston Globe: Boston, MA. 9 May 1982: p 51. Accessed 25 Jun 2016. <br class="br">1980s <br class="br">Context: Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength. When you make an impasse passable, that is strength. But you must have ego, the kind of ego which makes you think of yourself in terms of superlatives. You must want to be the greatest. We are all starved for compliments. So we do things that get positive feedback.

Source: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations - 1841-1844

Variant: Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

Source: P.S. I Love You

As quoted in Meditations for Women Who Do Too (1991) by Anne Wilson Schaef

Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci...
Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, Gallimard, 1968.

As quoted in While We Wait: Spiritual and Practical Advice for Those Trying to Adopt (2009) by Heidi Schlumpf, p. 37

This quote is often misattributed to Lincoln. The earliest instance that Quote Investigator could locate was &quot;in an advertisement in 1947 for a book about aging by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D&quot;. The advertisement for “The Second Forty Years” which ran in the Chicago Tribune newspaper read like this: The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years! (Compare 1947 March 16, Chicago Tribune, “How Long Do You Plan to Live?”, [Advertisement for the book &quot;The Second Forty Years&quot; by Edward J. Stieglitz, M.D.], p. C7, Chicago, Illinois. (ProQuest)). Source of misattribution: It’s Not the Years in Your Life That Count. It’s the Life in Your Years - Abraham Lincoln? Adlai Stevenson? Edward J. Stieglitz? Anonymous? by Quote Investigator on July 14, 2012 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/14/life-years-count/ <br class="br">To my way of thinking it is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count in the long run. <br class="br">Adlai Stevenson II, Address at Princeton University, &quot;The Educated Citizen&quot; (22 March 1954) http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/stevenson/adlai1954.html. This has also been paraphrased &quot;What matters most is not the years in your life, but the life in your years&quot; and misattributed to Abraham Lincoln and Mae West. <br class="br">Adlai Stevenson II, &quot;If I Were Twenty-One&quot; in Coronet (December 1955). <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Variant: It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.