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As I plow through the daily tasks of work and life, I collect quotes that resonate for me. Because of who I am and what I do, these tend to center around optimism, effort, endurance, and success. I call them Words to Entrepreneur By.
Here’s the latest batch:
“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every 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;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen."
--Thomas Carlyle
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
--Niccolò Machiavelli
"I believe in the impossible because no one else does."
--Florence Griffith Joyner
“You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.”
--Tina Fey
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
--Nelson Mandela
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
--Bruce Lee
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
--Stephen King
“You may delay, but time will not.”
--Benjamin Franklin
“While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.”
--Henry Link
“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible." -
--Francis of Assisi
“The only way around is through."
--Robert Frost
“The secret of getting things done is to act!”
--Dante Alighieri
“The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now.”
--Nolan Bushnell
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”
--Pablo Picasso
“So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don’t sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we’ve satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.”
--Lee Iacocca
“There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it. For if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.”
--C.J. Walker
“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.”
--Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Few ever lived to old age, and fewer still ever became distinguished, who were not in the habit of early rising.”
--John Todd
“I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”
--Oprah Winfrey
“There’s a tendency to mistake preparation for productivity. You can prepare all you want, but if you never roll the dice you’ll never be successful.”
--Shia LaBeouf
“Think of many things; do one.”
--Portuguese proverb
“Lost time is never found again.”
--Benjamin Franklin
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
--Benjamin Franklin
“Don’t confuse the urgent with the important.”
--Preston Ni
"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done."
--Louis D. Brandeis
“Long-range planning works best in the short term.”
--Doug Evelyn
“When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
--Aristotle
“If your faith doesn't remove the mountain... Get to climbing.”
--Johnnie Dent Jr.
By Managing Partner Mike Edelhart
@Mike Edelhart