"Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it."
Horace Mann

"The sum of one's intelligence is the sum of one's habits of mind."
Lauren Resnick

"Powerful indeed is the empire of habit."
Publicus Syrus, 42 BC

"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes."
Maxine Hong Kingston

"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keepsyou going."
Jim Ryuh

"Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one's explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking, that is the crux of intelligence. It isn't that one person knows more than another, then. In a sense, it is important to know less than the next person, or at least to be certain of less, thus enabling more curiosity and less explaining away because one has again encountered a well-known phenomenon. The less you know the more you can find out about, and finding out for oneself is what intelligence is all about."
Roger Schank

"How much do students really love to learn, to persist, to passionately attack a problem or a task? . . . to watch some of their prized ideas explode and to start anew? . . . to go beyond being merely dutiful or long-winded? Let us assess such things."
Grant Wiggins

"The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests."
Gail Sheehy

"Out of clutter, find Simplicity.
From discord, find Harmony.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
Albert Einstein

"A great pleasure in
Life is doing
What people say you
Cannot do."
Tommy John

"Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study."
Francis Bacon

"I believe everybody is creative, and everybody is talented. I just don't think that everybody is disciplined. I think that's a rare commodity."
Al Hirschfield

"There is no education like adversity."
Benjamin Disraeli

"What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens."
Thaddeus Golas

"Successful people aren't born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don't like to do. The successful people don't always like these things themselves; they just get on and do them."
William Makepeace Thackeray

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."
Kahlil Gibran

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude"
Thomas Jefferson

"Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition—such as lifting weights—we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity."
Stephen Covey

"When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery."
Lord Kelvin

"Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success."
Dr. Joyce Brothers

"The true test of character is . . . how we behave when we don't know what to do."
John Holt

"The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances."
Martha Washington

"Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day."
Arthur Golden

"A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
Hugh Downs

"To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits."
Henri Fredric Amiel

"Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding."
Harvey Mackay

"When we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
Wendell Berry

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
Aristotle

"Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind."
Leonardo da Vinci

"Help your children understand that excellence in education cannot be achieved without intellectual and moral integrity coupled by hard work and commitment."
National Commission on Excellence in Education

"The mind is like the stomach. It's not how much you put into it, but how much it digests."
Albert Jay Nock

"To make headway, improve your head."
B. C. Forbes

"The successful person is the individual who forms the habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do."
Donald Riggs

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think."
Benjamin Disraeli

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."
Winston Churchill

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
Booker T. Washington

"There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age."
Sophia Loren

"The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties."
Abigail Adams

"Trouble creates a capacity to handle it."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.
African proverb

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Take the obvious, add a cupful of brains, a generous pinch of imagination, a bucketful of courage and daring, stir well and bring to a boil."
Bernard Baruch

"Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles."
Helen Keller

"The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it."
Colin Wilson, author

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes."
Benjamin Disraeli

"Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health."
Carl Jung

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do."
John Holt

"It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of pacific station that great characters are formed."
Abigail Adams

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Ghandi

"You can’t talk your way out of what you’ve behaved yourself into."
Steven Covey

"To teach is to learn twice."
Joseph Joubert

"Let the beauty you love be what you do."
Jelaluddin Rumi

"Learning though imitation is fundamental to many species, including humans. As we become adults, we have a unique advantage: we can choose whom to imitate. We can also choose new models to replace the ones we outgrow."
Michael J. Gelb

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror."
Ken Keyes Jr., author

"Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you."
Robert Fulghum

"If your walking isn’t your preaching, there is no point in walking anywhere to preach."
St. Francis of Assisi

"I have never heard anything about the resolutions of the apostles but a good deal about their acts."
Horace Mann

"Live as if you like yourself, and it may happen."
Marge Piercy

"Act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in thyself."
Felix Adler

"It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting."
Millard Fuller, Founder of Habitat for Humanity

"If . . . you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
Catherine Aird

"The way you behave is the way you'll be judged."
Anonymous

"Keep in mind always the present your are constructing. It should be the future you want."
Alice walker

"Our worth is determined by the good deeds we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel."
Elias L. Magoon

"If real success is to attend the effort to bring a man to a definite position, one must first of all take the pains to find him where he is and begin there. This is the secret of the heart of helping others. Anyone who has not mastered this is himself deluded when he proposes to help others. In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him. If, however, I am disposed to plume myself on my greater understanding, it is because I am vain or proud, so that at bottom, instead of benefiting him, I want to be admired. But all true effort to help does not mean to be a sovereign but to be a servant, that to help does not mean to be ambitious but to be patient, that to help means to endure for the time being the imputation that one is in the wrong and does not understand what the other understands. . . . For to be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it. . . ."
Soren Kierkegaard

"See the good. . . . BE the good."
Peggy Moretti

"If you cannot mould yourself as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?"
Thomas Kempis

"Live your life so that your children can tell their children that you not only stood for something wonderful-you acted on it."
Dan Zadra, CEO Compendium, Inc.

"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do."
Lewis Cass

"Children have more need of models than of critics."
Carolyn Coats, author

"To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking."
Johann von Goethe

"The smartest thing that a person can do is to persistently think the thoughts that are consistent with the kind of person he or she would like to be."
Brian Tracy, author

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to wha
t men say. I just watch what they do."
Andrew Carnegie

"If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves."
Carl Jung

"Parents who use good communication skills are, at the same time, teaching their children to use good skills. When parents use angry or hostile words, their children do too. Often parents cause the very behaviors they don't want in their children. In short, they reap what they sow."
Joe Hasenstab, President, Performance Learning Systems

"To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while."
Josh Billings

"I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week."
Mario Cuomo

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
Edmund Burke

"Doing what we were meant to do creates fun, excitement and contentment in our lives, and invariably, in the lives of the people around us. When you're excited about something it's contagious."
Mark Victor Hansen, author and speaker