Success

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is more important than the outcome”

– Arthur Ashe (US tennis legend)

Circumstances

People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them.

- George Bernard Shaw

Visualisation

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously and never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture!

- Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

Work

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes"

- Oscar Wilde

Human desire

Human desire for freedom knows no bounds of race or religion or region.

- David Milliband, UK Foreign Secretary, Friday 28 September 2007, speaking in response to the escalating violence in Burma inflicted by the military regime on the Burmese people

Cleverness

The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Self

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."

- Nigel Hawthorne

Right

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

G. K. Chesterton
English author & mystery novelist (1874 - 1936)

Laughter

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Bad luck

It is bad luck to be superstitious.

Embracing Ignorance

"Working class doesn't any longer describe a stratum of society. It is a cultural commodity, dreamed up by glossy magazines and Channel 4 and whoever else has a material stake in kitschifying crassness. It's an option you may refuse...You don't have to read Jordan's autobiography or take The Sun. You don't have to refuse to let your child eat polenta for school dinners and go on stuffing him with meat pie. You don't have to stagger legless through Prague the night before your wedding. Footballers are not an obligation, pop music is not a birthright, knowing nothing is not your heritage."

- Howard Jacobson in The Independent

Belief

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

- Gerry Spence

Insight

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

- Albert Einstein

Relationships

By refusing to put language to it, you pretend it doesn't exist.

- Josh Lyman

Determination

There is no failure for the man who realises his power, who never knows when he is beaten; there is no failure for the determined endeavour, the unconquerable will. There is no failure for the man who gets up every time he falls, who rebounds like a rubber ball, who persists when everyone else gives up, who pushes on when everyone else turns back.