All quotes

Make up your minds that you are going to overcome every discouragement, and that you are not going to let any discouragement overcome you.

Very many people, very many students, who otherwise would succeed, who would go through school creditably, graduating with honours, have failed to succeed because they became discouraged.

out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed

I will not say that I became discouraged, for as I now look back over my life I do not recall that I ever became discouraged over anything that I set out to accomplish.

My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings.

Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.

We cannot get upon our feet, as a people, until we learn the saving habit; until we learn to save every nickel, every dime and every dollar that we can spare.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Any one can seek a job, but it requires a person of rare ability to create a job.

If we would be great, and good, and useful, we must pay the price. And remember that when we get down to the fundamental principles of truth, nature draws no colour line.

The men you see spending most of their time looking for higher and more lucrative positions are, nine times out of ten, men who have made worthless failures in other places.

You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.

I want you to make up your minds that you are going to be more nearly perfect, are going to put more manly and womanly strength into the preparation of your lessons each day, that you may be more useful.

There are but two directions in this life in which you can grow; backward or forward.

The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.

No one gets much out of life who does not make his education a real, vital part of himself.

Our ability to make the world better depends entirely upon our ability to use every opportunity to make ourselves better.

Cast down your bucket where you are.

I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.

At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy.

Ever since then I have had no patience with any school for my race in the South which did not teach its students the dignity of labour.

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.