The heights by great men reached and kept Where not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.

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.

To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease to exist at death.

Unsuccessful people make decisions based on current situations. Successful people make decisions based on where they want to be.

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

If people knew how hard worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

There is nothing in the world that empowers a human being to overcome external difficulties or internal hardships so much as the awareness that one has a task in life.

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.

How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave.

The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.

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

I can't imagine a person becoming a success who doesn’t give this game of life everything he’s got.

It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

A man, to carry on a successful business, must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. A man can cultivate this faculty only by an appreciation for the finer things in life.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.

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

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

My prayer is that when I die, all hell rejoices that I am out of the fight.

Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people – men and women, boys and girls – that make the world a special place.

It is frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, "If you become a soldier you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

If we do not make common cause to save the good old ship of the Union on this voyage, nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage.

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

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.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find a better man.

No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see the possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Vision without execution is hallucination.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to allow his vision wherever it takes him.

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.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.

Work is love made visible.