“Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.”

Samuel Lover

“The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.”

Margot Fonteyn

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

Jacob A. Riis

“The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. “

Ernest Newman

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible… what wine is so sparkling, so fragrant, so intoxicating, as possibility!”

Soren Kierkegaard

“An individual dies… when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.”

E. M. Cioran

“Happiness is not in our circumstances, but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.”

John B. Sheerin

“Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.”

Albert Camus

“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.”

Orison Swett Marden

“Excellence is not an act but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you will do the best.”

Marva Collins