Courage and Strength

It’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

To sin by silence when we should protest, Makes cowards of men.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh.

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.

The man who knows it can’t be done counts the risk, not the reward.

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.

To a certain extent, a little blindness is necessary when you undertake a risk.

Blind alleys and garden paths leading nowhere are the principal hazards in research.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

I pick up favorite quotations, and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Problems are to the mind what exercise is to the muscles, they toughen and make strong. Problems make one better able to cope with life.

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.

The greater the obstacle, the greater the glory in overcoming it; and difficulties are but the maids of honor to set off the virtue.

He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

The block of granite which was an obstacle on the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone on the pathway of the strong.

Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Be winged arrows, aiming at fulfillment and goal, even though you will tire without having reached the mark.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.