Motivational Quotes

page 2

Variant: You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.

Source: Alice in Wonderland

Source: The Diary of Anne Frank

" The Problem of Increasing Human Energy http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1900-06-00.htm", Century Illustrated Magazine (June 1900)

E quando você quer alguma coisa, todo o Universo conspira para que você realize seu desejo.
Variant: And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 22; a variant of this has become attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen" — but no occurrence of this a statement has been located prior to in The Gift of Depression : Twenty-one Inspirational Stories Sharing Experience, Strength, and Hope (2001) by John F. Brown, p. 56

Attributed to Kierkegaard in a number of books, the earliest located on Google Books being the 1976 book Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism by Robert A. Hipkiss, p. 83 http://books.google.com/books?id=g_JaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. In the 1948 The Hibbert Journal: Volumes 46-47 the quote is referred to as "the famous Kierkegaardian slogan" on p. 237 http://books.google.com/books?id=UuDRAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the+famous+Kierkegaardian+slogan+life+is+not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor, which may be intended to suggest the phrase is Kierkegaard-esque rather than being something written by Kierkegaard. In reality this seems to be a slightly altered version of the quote "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced" which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor.
Misattributed

Source: The Open Door (1957) This quotation is often contracted into: Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. or paraphrased: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1499/
Variant: I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Context: Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Variant: Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Variant: Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

Attributed to Winston Churchill in The Prodigal Project : Book I : Genesis (2003) by Ken Abraham and Daniel Hart, p. 224 and other places, though no source attribution is given. It actually derives from an advertising campaign for Budweiser beer in the late 1930s.
Misattributed
Variant: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Source: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/03/success-final/

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: The Alchemist

Variant: Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

Variant: Look Toward the stars but keep your feet firmly on the ground.
Source: The Greatest American President: The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt

Source: Buddha's Little Instruction Book

Source: Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex

ii. America: The Pueblo Indians http://books.google.com/books?id=w6vUgN16x6EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jung+Memories+Dreams+and+Reflections&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LLxKUcD0NfSo4APh0oDABg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Context: We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not fit in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modem times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.

On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos...

Variant: Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living out fears.

This has become attributed to both Walt Whitman and Helen Keller, but has not been found in either of their published works, and variations of the quote are listed as a proverb commonly used in both the US and Canada in A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992), edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Kelsie B. Harder and Stewart A. Kingsbury.
Misattributed

volume I, chapter VI: "The Voyage", page 266 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=284&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter to sister Susan Elizabeth Darwin (4 August 1836)
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)
Source: The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

As quoted in Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0688011632 (1970)
1970s

Pt. 2, ch. 31
Jean Louise (Scout) Finch & Atticus Finch
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: "An' they chased him 'n' never could catch him 'cause they didn't know what he looked like, an' Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice..."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."

Source: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657 note: 1940s, Male and Female (1949)

Actually said by Napoleon Hill, Stone later added the line "...with P.M.A." (Positive Mental Attitude) to the end of this quote.
Misattributed
Variant: Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

March 11, 1856
Journals (1838-1859)

Source: The Secret Garden

As quoted in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1944; 1948) by Dale Carnegie; though Roosevelt has sometimes been credited with the originating the expression, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't" is set in quote marks, indicating she herself was quoting a common expression in saying this. Actually, this saying was coined back even earlier, 1836, by evangelist Lorenzo Dow in his sermons about ministers saying the Bible contradicts itself, telling his listeners, "… those who preach it up, to make the Bible clash and contradict itself, by preaching somewhat like this: 'You can and you can't-You shall and you shan't-You will and you won't-And you will be damned if you do-And you will be damned if you don't.' "

1 September 1875, page 226
John of the Mountains, 1938
Context: How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all round the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris — we hear them boom again, for we read past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarser senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

Source: House Harkonnen

Source: Like the Flowing River

Variant: Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

Source: 1984

Source: Complete Lyrics

Variant: Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.

Attributed to Cicero in J. M. Braude's Speaker's Desk Book of Quips, Quotes, & Anecdotes (Jaico Pub. House, 1966), p. 52.
Dennis McHenry in a 2011 post at theCAMPVS.com http://thecampvs.com/2011/08/03/cicero-on-books-and-the-soul/ identified a source for the exact form of words in the essay "On the Pleasure of Reading" http://books.google.com/books?id=0YfQAAAAMAAJ&dq=cicero%20%22room%20without%20books%22%20%2B%22contemporary%20review%22&pg=PA240#v=onepage&q&f=false by Sir John Lubbock, published in The Contemporary Review, vol. 49 (1886) https://archive.org/details/contemporaryrev55unkngoog, pp. 240–51 https://archive.org/stream/contemporaryrev55unkngoog#page/n250/mode/2up, in which Lubbock wrote that "Cicero described a room without books as a body without a soul" (p. 241). The same sentence may also be found on p. 61 https://archive.org/stream/thepleasuresofli01lubbuoft#page/60/mode/2up of Lubbock's collection The Pleasures of Life. Part I. 18th edition (London and New York : Macmillan and Co. 1890) https://archive.org/details/thepleasuresofli01lubbuoft, in a lecture titled "A Song of Books". McHenry suggested that Lubbock may have had in mind the words "postea vero quam Tyrannio mihi libros disposuit mens addita videtur meis aedibus" at Cicero, Ad Atticum 4.8, which are translated by E. O. Winstedt on p. 293 https://archive.org/stream/letterstoatticus01ciceuoft#page/292/mode/2up of Cicero: Letters to Atticus I (London : William Heinemann, and New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons 1912) https://archive.org/details/letterstoatticus01ciceuoft "Since Tyrannio has arranged my books, the house seems to have acquired a soul", and by Evelyn Shuckburgh on p. 234 https://archive.org/stream/cu31924012541433#page/n283/mode/2up of The Letters of Cicero. Vol. I. B. C. 68–52 (London : George Bell and Sons 1908) https://archive.org/details/cu31924012541433 "Moreover, since Tyrannio has arranged my books for me, my house seems to have had a soul added to it" (although the Latin word " mens http://athirdway.com/glossa/?s=mens", rendered "soul" by both Winstedt and Shuckburgh, is more usually translated by the English "mind"). D. R. Shackleton Bailey in Cicero's Letters to Atticus (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books 1978), p. 162, translated "And now that Tyrannio has put my books straight, my house seems to have woken to life".
Disputed
Variant: Ut conclave sine libris ita corpus sine anima" A room without books is like a body without a soul

Disputed
Variant: No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Source: Sometimes claimed to appear in her book This is My Story, but in The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes (2006), Keyes writes on p. 97 that "Bartlett's and other sources say her famous quotation can be found in This is My Story, Roosevelt's 1937 autobiography. It can't. Quotographer Rosalie Maggio scoured that book and many others by and about Roosevelt in search of this line, without success. In their own extensive searching, archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, have not been able to find the quotation in This Is My Story or any other writing by the First Lady. A discussion of some of the earliest known attributions of this quote to Roosevelt, which may be a paraphrase from an interview, can be found in this entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/30/not-inferior/.

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

As quoted in The Gigantic Book of Teachers' Wisdom (2007) by Frank McCourt and Erin Gruwell, p. 410

Context: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

As quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126
Variant: Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

No. 147.
The Tatler (1711–1714)
Variant: A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body
Context: Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.

This appears on the opening placard of the film The Equalizer, attributing it to Twain, but there is no evidence that Twain wrote it. A precursor is found in Taylor Hartman's self-help book The Character Code (first published 1991), where it is not attributed to Twain: "The three most significant days in your life are: 1. The day you were born. 2. The day you find out why you were born. 3. The day you discover how to contribute the gift you were born to give" ( Google Books link https://books.google.com/books?id=gIKCxWxNmeMC&pg=PA147&dq=%22day+you+find+out+why%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwijrJzc84vLAhUJzGMKHajvADEQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&q=%22day%20you%20find%20out%20why%22&f=false)
Disputed

Often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt without an original source in her writings, for example in the introduction to It Seems to Me : Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt (2001) by Leonard C. Schlup and Donald W. Whisenhunt, p. 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=UeFWjTMcLZYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA2#v=onepage&q&f=false. But archivists have not been able to find the quote in any of her writings, see the comment from Ralph Keyes in The Quote Verifier above.
Disputed

Variant: Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

However, see also the attributed quote "desperate courage makes One a majority."
Attributed to Jackson by Robert F. Kennedy in his "Foreword" to the "Young Readers Memorial Edition" of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, and by Ronald Reagan in nominating Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court, this has never been found in Jackson's writings, and there is no record of him having declared it. Somewhat similar statements are known to have been made by others:
A man with God is always in the majority. ~ John Knox
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. ~ Henry David Thoreau
One on God's side is a majority ~ Wendell Phillips
Misattributed

Entrepreneur: Michael Dell https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197566 (13 October 2012)

As quoted in Coco Chanel : Her Life, Her Secrets (1971) by Marcel Haedrich

Attributed to Watson in: William G. Dickerson (1995) In search of the ultimate practice. p. 19.

Gertrude Elion https://www.famousscientists.org/gertrude-b-elion/

Harvard address (2008)

Audentes fortuna iuvat.
Variant translations:
Fortune favors the brave.
Fortune helps the daring.
Fortune sides with him who dares.
Compare:
Fortibus est fortuna viris data.
Fortune is given to brave men.
Ennius, Annales, 257
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book X, Line 284