Quotations

          When I was a student at Vanderbilt, Professor William Engel taught me about the 16th and 17th century habit of keeping commonplace books, in which readers and students would collect quotations or passages from literature that they found particularly appealing. I have maintained a commonplace book since then. What follows are, in no particular order, some of the quotations I have collected over the years. If you have a favorite quotation to include, please email it to me!


          The professional . . . is in essence one who provides service. . . It is a service that wells up from the entire complex of his personality. True, some specialized and highly developed techniques may be included, but their mode of expression is given its deepest meaning by the personality of the practitioner. In a very real sense his professional service cannot be separate from his personal being. He has no goods to sell, no land to till. His only asset is himself. It turns out that there is no right price for service, for what is a share of a man worth? If he does not contain the quality of integrity, he is worthless. If he does, he is priceless. The value is either nothing or it is infinite.
                                                                 -- Elbert P. Tuttle

          Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
                                                             -- George Santayana

          It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
                                                                     -- Earl Warren

         The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.
                                                                        -- Euripides

         The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.
                                                                  -- Denis Watley


         In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
                                                                -- Robert Heinlein

         Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.
                                                                 -- Oprah Winfrey

         We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
                                                                   -- Lee Iacocca

         Justice does not come from the outside. It comes from inner peace.
                                                                   -- Barbara Hall

         You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere.
                                                                   -- Lee Iacocca

         Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.
                                                         -- Theodore Roosevelt

         You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.
                                                                  -- Barbara Hall

         The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.
                                                                     -- Ben Stein

         Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.
                                                               -- Henry J. Kaiser

         A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
                                                            -- Sir Francis Bacon

         Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
                                                            -- George S. Patton

         It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
                                                                  -- Philip Adams


         If you want to make good use of your time, you've got to know what's most important and then give it all you've got.
                                                                  -- Lee Iacocca

         I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you.
                                                                -- Oprah Winfrey

         If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
                                                               -- Anna Quindlen

         I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
                                                                      -- Bill Cosby

         My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.'
                                                                  -- Helen Hayes

        If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.
                                                              -- Joseph Addison

        Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal.
                                                                     -- Mike Ditka

        Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
                                                           -- Thomas A. Edison

         Underpromise; overdeliver.
                                                                   -- Tom Peters

         One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
                                                            -- Bertrand Russell

         Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
                                                      -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel

          In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.
                                                                 -- John Ruskin

         Never continue in a job you don't enjoy. If you're happy in what you're doing, you'll like yourself, you'll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you will have had more success than you could possibly have imagined.
                                                             -- Johnny Carson

          Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
                                                           -- Sir William Osler

          I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
                                                        -- Thomas Jefferson

          Every big success happens after I think I have exhausted one-hundred percent of my options.
                                                        -- Barbara Corcoran

          Remove the rock from your shoe rather than learn to limp comfortably.
                              -- Stephen C. Paul and Gary Max Collins

          The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money.
                                                           -- Bernard Meltzer

          No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?
                                                               -- Lee Iacocca