376
Every person naturally wants to become all that he is capable of becoming; this desire to realize innate possibilities is inherent in human nature; we cannot help wanting to be all that we can be.
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377
Success in life is becoming what you want to be.
378
The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.
379
You are to become a creator, not a competitor.
380
There is no short cut to the making of these ideals into glad realities.
381
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.
382
If you want to change the world get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.
383
If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.
384
Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.
385
Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone.
386
Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.
387
The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent.
388
Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.
389
To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.
390
The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.
391
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.
392
Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
393
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.
394
Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.
395
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Wrongly attributed
This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.
396
God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.
Attribution contested
Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.
397
Our attempts should be not to extinguish nature, but to repress it; not to stand unmoved at distress, but endeavour to turn every disaster to our own advantage. Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Wrongly attributed
The single most-shared sentence ever credited to Confucius, and it is an Irish novelist's. Goldsmith wrote it for the Public Ledger in 1760 and collected it in 1762, in a series of letters supposedly by a Chinese visitor. Letter VII opens with a headnote in Goldsmith's own hand: the Editor thinks proper to acquaint the reader that the greatest part of the following letter seems to him to be little more than a rhapsody of sentences borrowed from Confucius, the Chinese philosopher. Two paragraphs later the narrator says he holds the volume of Confucius in his hand. That framing is precisely how the line became Confucius's, and later Mandela's. Note also the comma after glory, which the popular version drops, and that Goldsmith wrote the same sentence again in Letter XXII with a different opening.
398
The result of it all may be summed up in his favourite motto, “Be kind, for every one is fighting a hard battle.”
Platomisattributed·“Ian Maclaren”: The Life of the Rev. John Watson, D.D., by W. Robertson Nicoll·1908
Wrongly attributed
Attributed to Plato constantly, and to Philo of Alexandria almost as often; it is in neither. The words belong to John Watson, a Liverpool Presbyterian minister who wrote fiction as Ian Maclaren, and they are recorded here by his biographer and editor as his favourite motto. The popular form has been smoothed twice over: every one has become everyone you meet, and the earliest circulating version of the motto is not kind at all but pitiful, in the older sense of full of pity. Nothing in the record puts any form of it before the 1890s.
399
The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it is the fruit of “genius” (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)
Attribution contested
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains is one of the most quoted sentences in English and Carlyle did not write it. This is what he wrote, and the differences are real: transcendent, not infinite; trouble, not pains; and first of all, which concedes that taking trouble is only where genius starts. The familiar wording appears later in the century in other hands and is usually traced to Jane Ellice Hopkins in 1870. Carlyle got the credit because he got there first with the thought.
400
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work.
Thomas A. Edisondisputed·Edison: His Life and Inventions, by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin·1910
Attribution contested
The famous form -- I have not failed, I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work -- has no source in Edison. The earliest record of the remark is this one, in the authorised 1910 biography, and it is a colleague's recollection of a conversation, not Edison writing. Note what changes in the retelling: several thousand becomes ten thousand, and a man cheerfully counting negative results becomes a man defending himself against failure.