Destiny and Overcoming

It is only through work and strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom grinding need has trained to mighty effort.

Diligence is the mother of good luck.

We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor souls who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

We all have to take defeats in life.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Timing is everything. There is a tide in the affairs of men which when taken at the flood leads on to fortune.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

To keep our faces toward change, and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate, is strength undefeatable.

Success is not to be measured by the position someone has reached in life, but the obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed.

If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her. But once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour by hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going.

But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up.

Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.

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

Hos successus alit: possunt, quia posse videntur. These success encourages: they can because they think they can.

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit Litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto Vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram.