My Commonplace Book
Observations gleaned from various sources that kept me going. A handy tool for anyone yearning for a source of inspiration or going through a trying time!
“The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago, the second best time is now”
— Chinese Proverb
“Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”
— Winston Churchill
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade, you do not expect to sit”
— Nelson Henderson
“Just because you are doing a lot more, doesn’t mean you are getting a lot more done. Don’t confuse movement with progress”
— Denzel Washington
“Faith is the substance of things hopeful and the evidence of things not seen”
— Hebrews 11:1
“He who has a why to live, can endure anyhow”
— Friedrich Nietzche
“True desire in the heart for anything good is God’s proof to you; set beforehand to indicate that it’s yours already”
— Denzel Washington
“Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die”
— Albert King
“In order to have you have to do and in order to do you have to be”
— Unkown
“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Success
If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it
If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it
If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,
If gladly you’ll sweat for it,
Fret for it,
Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of the opposition for it,
If you’ll simply go after the thing that you want
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,
If neither cold, poverty, famish and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,
If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
With the help of God, you’ll get it.
-Berton Braley