Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“The starting point of all achievement is DESIRE. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others”
― Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power

“You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
― Peter Drucker

“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself”
― Earl Nightingale

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind.”
― Earl Nightingale

“What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“You may be hurt if you love too much, but you will live in misery if you love too little.”
― Napoleon Hill, Napoleon Hill's Positive Action Plan: 365 Meditations For Making Each Day a Success

“How are you coming with your home library? Do you need some good ammunition on why it's so important to read? The last time I checked the statistics...I think they indicated that only four percent of the adults in this country have bought a book within the past year. That's dangerous. It's extremely important that we keep ourselves in the top five or six percent.
In one of the Monthly Letters from the Royal Bank of Canada it was pointed out that reading good books is not something to be indulged in as a luxury. It is a necessity for anyone who intends to give his life and work a touch of quality. The most real wealth is not what we put into our piggy banks but what we develop in our heads. Books instruct us without anger, threats and harsh discipline. They do not sneer at our ignorance or grumble at our mistakes. They ask only that we spend some time in the company of greatness so that we may absorb some of its attributes.

You do not read a book for the book's sake, but for your own.

You may read because in your high-pressure life, studded with problems and emergencies, you need periods of relief and yet recognize that peace of mind does not mean numbness of mind.

You may read because you never had an opportunity to go to college, and books give you a chance to get something you missed. You may read because your job is routine, and books give you a feeling of depth in life.

You may read because you did go to college.

You may read because you see social, economic and philosophical problems which need solution, and you believe that the best thinking of all past ages may be useful in your age, too.

You may read because you are tired of the shallowness of contemporary life, bored by the current conversational commonplaces, and wearied of shop talk and gossip about people.

Whatever your dominant personal reason, you will find that reading gives knowledge, creative power, satisfaction and relaxation. It cultivates your mind by calling its faculties into exercise.

Books are a source of pleasure - the purest and the most lasting. They enhance your sensation of the interestingness of life. Reading them is not a violent pleasure like the gross enjoyment of an uncultivated mind, but a subtle delight.

Reading dispels prejudices which hem our minds within narrow spaces. One of the things that will surprise you as you read good books from all over the world and from all times of man is that human nature is much the same today as it has been ever since writing began to tell us about it.

Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both.”
― Earl Nightingale

“When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“Change almost never fails because it's too early. It almost always fails because it's too late.”
― Seth Godin

“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“The key to successful leadership is influence, not authority.”
― Ken Blanchard

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“There's a difference between interest
and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it
only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you
accept no excuses - only results.”
― Ken Blanchard

“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.”
― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

“As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big.”
― Donald Trump

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.”
― Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don't do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself,. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
― David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”
― Peter Drucker

“Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”
― Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

“What's measured improves”
― Peter Drucker