If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.

Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself—and be lenient to everybody else.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the induction of a new order of things.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

The two qualities that chiefly inspire regard and affection [are] that a thing is you own and that it is your only one.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.

The individual is not accountable to society for his actions, insofar as these concern the interests of no person but himself.

What we do now echoes in eternity.

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting and achieving goals.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Dying is nothing. What is terrible is not to live.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he as imagined, he will meet with success unexpectedly in common hours.

First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.

The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.

Never cross a man, not afraid to die.