26
The athlete trains for his race; and the mind must be put into training if one will win life's race.
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Attribution
27
Great men never wait for opportunities; they make them.
28
Every person who amounts to anything feels within himself a power which is ever pushing him on and urging him to perpetual improvement.
29
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
30
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide
31
The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.
32
Great men, I say, often rejoice at crosses of fortune just as brave soldiers do at wars.
33
The great crisis must come, or no man has the chance to develop great qualities.
Theodore Rooseveltverified·The Conditions of Success, an address at the Cambridge Union·May 26, 1910
34
In this life we get nothing save by effort.
Theodore Rooseveltverified·The Strenuous Life, an address before the Hamilton Club, Chicago·April 10, 1899
35
Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.
36
To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.
37
The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.
38
This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being, and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off.
39
Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
40
Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.
41
Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.
42
Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.
Unverified attribution
Wording taken from a viewer's transcription of the video. This is the Dillard address, not the Pennsylvania one: Dillard has published no transcript we could reach — its site returns 403 to scripts and its archived pages are announcements rather than text — so the phrasing, including the comma, is unconfirmed.
43
I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emersonmisattributed·Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers, by Muriel Strode, in The Open Court, Volume XVII, Number 567·August 1903
Wrongly attributed
Universally attributed to Emerson, and it is in none of his essays, journals or letters. It is Muriel Strode, an American writer almost nobody has heard of, in the August 1903 issue of The Open Court. The rewriting is the interesting part: Strode wrote a vow in the first person about herself, and the version that circulates has been turned into an instruction issued to somebody else. Do not go where the path may lead is not what she said. I will not follow is.
44
Think good thoughts. Protect your mind. What your mind consumes shapes your thoughts. Your thoughts lead your actions. Your actions change your life for better or worse. Get rid of what drains you. Embrace what pushes you towards your dream life.
Spread Cheer / Motivational Quotes (@spreadcheer1)unverified·Post attributed to @spreadcheer1 (user-supplied transcription)
Unverified attribution
Account attribution and wording were supplied by a user. The account is identified as the reported sharer; original authorship and the direct post have not been independently verified. The publication date is unknown.
45
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!
Wrongly attributed
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.
46
For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.
Socratesmisattributed·Of Hearing, in Plutarch's Morals, Volume 1 (corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin)·1878
Wrongly attributed
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel is printed on university walls under Socrates's name. Socrates wrote nothing at all, and the sentence is not in Plato either. It is Plutarch, four hundred years later, in the Moralia essay usually called On Listening to Lectures -- and it is not an aphorism about education but a rebuke to a student who sits and admires the lecturer instead of thinking. Note what the tidy modern version loses: Plutarch does not say the mind is a flame to be kindled, he says it is not a pot, and that what it wants is fuel.