In Celebration of My 51st birthday, Here Are 51 Lessons About Life in Quotes

Life Lessons for a drowning culture

1) “Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.” — Roger Babson

2) “A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.” — Pearl Bailey

3) “Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.” — Buddha

4) “Whatever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.” — Edmund Burke

5) “Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind.” – William S. Burroughs

6) “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.” — Confucius

7) “Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.” — Thomas Carlyle

8) “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” — Frederick Douglass

9) “What gets measured, gets managed.” — Peter Drucker

10) “Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.” — Harlan Ellison

11) “If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.” — Epictetus

12) “Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

13) “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.” — Edgar R. Fiedler

14) “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor E. Frankl

15) “Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.” — Arthur Freed

16) “Action expresses priorities.” — Mahatma Gandhi

17) “I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.” — Edward Gibbon

18) “Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.” — Francesco Guicciardini

19) “The life we end up with is simply an accumulation of the choices we make.” — Darren Hardy

20) “I think that the good and the great are only separated by the willingness to sacrifice.” — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

21) “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” — William James

22) “You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” — C.G. Jung

23) “No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly.” — Juvenal

24) “Life’s most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

25) “Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

26) “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” — Martin Luther

27) “If you want to double your success ratio, you have to double your failure ratio.” — Harvey Mackay

28) “The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.” — Michelangelo

29) “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.” — Earl Nightingale

30) “The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.” — Blaise Pascal

31) “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” — George S. Patton

32) “Function in disaster; finish in style.” — Howard Penney

33) “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” — Pericles

34) “Little by little one walks far.” — Peruvian Proverb

35) “A few vices are sufficient to darken many virtues.” — Plutarch

36) “Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards.” — Tony Robbins

37) “A few years ago, I lost one of my dearest friends. He died at age 53 – heart attack. David is gone, but he was one of my very special friends. I used to say of David that if I was stuck in a foreign jail somewhere accused unduly and if they would allow me one phone call, I would call David. Why? He would come and get me. That’s a friend. Somebody who would come and get you.” — Jim Rohn

38) “Expedience is the death of principle.” — Kurt Schlichter

39) “Not to feel one’s misfortunes is not human, not to bear them is not manly.” — Seneca

40) “The superior man blames himself. The inferior man blames others.” — Don Shula

41) “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.” — B. F. Skinner

42) “God says, ‘Choose what you will and pay for it.’” — Spanish Proverb

43) “The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.” — Ben Stein

44) “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

45) “Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.” — Publilius Syrus

46) “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — Henry David Thoreau

47) “The truth is never the problem; The problem is always the problem.” — Jeff Vanvonderen

48) “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” — Jack Welch

49) “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.” — John Wooden

50) “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.” — Malcolm X

51) “The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now.” — Zig Ziglar

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