Ideals
are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands.
But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as
your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
- Carl Schurz
Ideas
are the foundations upon which civilization is built.
- Nicholas Pratt
Never,
never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a
wider one is still possible.
- Richard Jefferies
If
you have a penny and I have a penny and we exchange pennies, you still have one
cent and I still have one cent.
But
if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, you now have two
ideas and I now have two ideas.
Great
minds discuss ideas,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people.
- Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900-1986) U.S. Navy
Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling
before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded
it in time.
- Wallace
Stegner, A Capsule History of Conservation, When the Bluebird Sings in the
Leamonade Springs
A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any
more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
- Sébastien-Roch
Nicolas de Chamfort (1741–94), French writer, wit. Maxims and
Considerations, vol. 2, no. 446 (1796).
The
value of an idea lies in the using of it.
- Thomas Edison (1847-1931), inventor
Our
best ideas come from clerks and stock boys.
- Sam Walton (1918-1992), founder, Wal-Mart
Identity
is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes.
Identity is built. It is built
every day and every minute throughout the day.
- Margaret Halsey
Shun
idleness. It is the rust that
attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
- Voltaire
Beware
lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
- Aesop
Illusion
is the first of all pleasures.
Imagination
is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
Nothing
is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient
will we should always have sufficient means.
It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Let
all your views in life be directed to a solid, however moderate, independence;
without it no man can be happy, nor even honest.
- Junius
If money is your hope for independence you will
never have it. The only real
security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge,
experience, and ability.
- Henry Ford
Insist
on yourself; never imitate. Your
own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole
life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous half-expression. That
which each can do best none but his Maker can teach him.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Resolve
to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.
- Matthew Arnold
Know
then that the world exists for you. . . . All that Adam had, all that Caesar
could, you have and can do. Adam
called his house heaven and earth; Caesar called his house Rome; you perhaps
call yours a cobbler's trade, a hundred acres of ploughed land, or a scholar's
garret. Yet line for line and point
for point your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.
Build therefore your own world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Inequalities
are intractable, particularly in a free society, because they arise from the
unequal distribution of the capacities for adding economic value in society.
Have
you got a problem? Do what you can
where you are with what you've got.
- Theodore Roosevelt
We
should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered
today? what passions opposed?
what temptations resisted? what
virtue acquired? Our vices will
abate of themselves if they are brought every day to the shrift.
- Seneca
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking
the way one has lived.
-
Paul Bourget (1852–1935), French novelist. Le
Démon de Midi, “Conclusion” (1914).
This
above all; to thine own self be true
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
- Polonius, in Shakespeare's Hamlet
Prince of Denmark
To
be persuasive, we must be believable.
To be believable, we must be credible.
To be credible, we must be truthful.
The
unconscious part of your brain never stops working. So when you're faced with a perplexing job, work on it as
hard as you can. Then, if you can't
lick it, try sleeping on it or taking a walk or relaxing with friends.
If you have primed yourself with all available facts, the answer is
likely to "dawn" on you while your mind is seemingly at rest. . . .
How can you develop your intuitive powers?
Like any other form of thinking, intuition requires an alertness,
sensitivity and discipline of mind which have to be cultivated. . . . Intuition
isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.
- John Kord Lagermann
Stop
talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand.
Return to the root and you will find the meaning; Pursue the light and
you lose its source. Look inward, and in a flash you will conquer the apparent and
the void. All come from mistaken
views. There is no need to seek the
truth, only stop having views.
- Sen T'san
Copyright 2002 by Pratt Systems. All rights reserved worldwide.