Little minds are tamed by misfortune and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. The proceed to improve on the worst.

Life's blows cannot break a person whose spirit is warmed at the fire of enthusiasm!

Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path.

Suppose your whole world seems to rock on its foundations. Hold on steadily, let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something much nearer to your heart's desire.

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious of the rose.

He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.

Do you feel gloomy? Lift your eyes. Stand on your feet. Say a few words of appreciation and love to the lord. Be positive.

Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.

If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain.

Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

The less you respond to negative people, the positive your life will become.

Be like the flower, turn your face to the sun.

So it is more useful to watch a man in time of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask it torn off, reality remains.

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that setbacks and griefs which endure help us in our march forward.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

To establish true self-esteem, we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.

The positive thinker see the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieve the impossible.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.

I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.

Have to and get to—both are choices. One is negative and one is positive. Choose the right one and it can change your life.

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.