
“Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.”
Source: The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.”
Source: The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
“You do realize how many impossible things have to be true for that to have happened?”
Source: 2000s and posthumous publications, A Time Odyssey, Firstborn (2007), Chapter 29, “Alexei” (p. 187)
On the passing of the revolutionary Grand Remonstrance of November 1641 listing Parliament's grievances against King Charles I, as quoted in A History of the Rebellion (first published 1702 – 1704) by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609 - 1674)
“To accomplish great things we must live as though we had never to die.”
Pour exécuter de grandes choses, il faut vivre comme si on ne devait jamais mourir.
Quoted in Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays (2009), by Keith Stern, p. 466.
Variant: In order to achieve great things, we must live as though we were never going to die.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 172.
Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 106.
On Leading Well
Federalist No. 70 (18 March 1788)
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
Context: Men often oppose a thing, merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. But if they have been consulted, and have happened to disapprove, opposition then becomes, in their estimation, an indispensable duty of self-love. They seem to think themselves bound in honor, and by all the motives of personal infallibility, to defeat the success of what has been resolved upon contrary to their sentiments. Men of upright, benevolent tempers have too many opportunities of remarking, with horror, to what desperate lengths this disposition is sometimes carried, and how often the great interests of society are sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, and to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind. Perhaps the question now before the public may, in its consequences, afford melancholy proofs of the effects of this despicable frailty, or rather detestable vice, in the human character.