How you do anything is how you do everything.
The complete collection
All quotes
Filter the collection
If a man knows the wherefore of his existence, then the manner of it can take care of itself.
Wrongly attributed
Usually quoted as Frankl's own: he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Frankl never claimed it. He quotes Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning, and the line is Nietzsche's, from Twilight of the Idols in 1888. The familiar English wording matches no published translation of the period; Ludovici's 1911 rendering is the one above.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Where there's a will there's a way.
Hate has four letters, but so does love. Enemies has seven letters, but so does friends. Lying has five letters, but so does truth. Failure has seven letters, but so does success. Cry has three letters, but so does joy. Negativity has ten letters, but so does positivity. You always have a choice, so choose the better side of it.
I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
Wrongly attributed
Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.
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.
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.
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.