W. Clement Stone

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success – or are they holding you back?

You. too, can determine what you want. You can decide on your major objectives, targets, aims, and destination.

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.

Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy – but he who has shown the better temper.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

She stepped out barefoot on to the grass, her soul naked, sun beating to her heart’s rhythm, bathing her skin. In her mind, she had already escaped.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.