Professor Donchez,
I apologize for how long these quotes took me to get to but I have been trying to create a truly great list! There are some funny ones and serious ones. I know there are quite a few but I hope you will read all of them. Enjoy!
Catherine Patterson
Practice is the best of all instructors. –Publilius Syrus
No one know what he can do till he tries. – Publilius Syrus
The future of work consists of learning a living. –Marshall McLuhan
You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself. – Sam Levenson
You will always find some Eskimos ready to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves. – Stanislaw J. Lec
Each mind has its own method. –Emerson
Cultivate those who can teach you. – Baltasar Gracian
Practice is everything. –Diogenes Laeritus
Work smarter, not harder. –Anon.
The shortest way to get many things done is to do one thing at a time. –Samuel Smiles
Sleep on it and then decide, unless you have a competitor who doesn’t need the sleep. –Theodore Waller (VP, Grollier, Inc.)
I must govern the clock, not be governed by it. –Golda Meir
Your health comes first-you can always hang yourself later. – Yiddish Proverb
All of our senior executives, including me, knew what it felt like to be thrown into deep water not knowing if you could swim. –Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (CEO, IBM and U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Fortune Magazine, 1977)
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. –Pogo
Always assume your opponent to be smarter than you. –Walther Rathenau
A good manager must be willing to take a stand even at the risk of offending people. –Betsy White
The man who makes no mistake does not usually make anything. –William Connor Magee
Great successes never come without risks. –Flavius Josephus
A mistake is simply another way of doing things. –Katherine Graham
Define the problem before you pursue a solution. –John Williams (CEO, Spence Corp.)
No matter how complicated a problem is, it usually can be reduced to a simple, comprehensible form which is often the best solution. – Dr. An Wang
Listen and Learn. –FDR
Discovery [of a solution] consists of looking at the same things as everyone else and thinking something different. – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology)
I never was satisfied with a problem that I understood only partly. I wanted to understand it as completely as I could. –David Sarnoff (Founder and Pres. RCA)
Aspirin Doctor: A manager who tries to solve every problem the same way, like a doctor who prescribes aspiring for every unknown illness. – Harold S. Hook (Chairman and CEO, American General Corp.)
It is hard to solve a problem when you don’t even know it exists. – Fred Heiser
Peak performers concentrate on solving problems rather than on placing blame for them. –Charles Garfield
As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity conceals it. –Horace
Don’t make excuses-make good. –Elbert Hubbard
If you build a house over a crack in the earth, it’s your own fault. –Albert A. Grant
Our own actions are our security, not others’ judgments. –George Herbert
Good is not good where better is expected. – Thomas Fuller
We have to earn our wings every day. –Frank Borman, Astronaut and CEO, Eastern Airlines
When your work speaks for itself, get out of the way. –Thomas “Wayne” Brazell, U.S. Army Materiel Command
You can’t think and hit the ball at the same time. –Yogi Berra
As in a game of cards, so in the game of life we must play what is dealt to us; and the glory consists, not so much in winning, as in playing a poor hand well. – Josh Billings
"If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else." -Yogi Berra
No man can lose what he never had. –Izaak Walton
It’s crazy to work this hard, but I love it. –Joe Tanner, Division Manager, DuPont
The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success. –David Sarnoff
There is no finish line. –Nike Corp. Motto
I liked the shaver so much that I bought the company. –Victor Kiam, CEO, Remington
Forty thousand wishes won’t fill your bucket with fishes. –Fisherman’s saying
Motivation will almost always beat mere talent. –Norman Augustine, President and CEO, Martin Marietta Corp.
Character is power. –Booker T. Washington
Everyone thinks his sack is heaviest. –George Herbert
If you don’t know how, why pretend? –Huang O, Chinese poet
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. – Thomas Carlyle
We all had the feeling we could do no wrong. We got carried away by our own growth. –William H. Wilson, Founder, Pioneer/Eclipse Corp.
Growth is a by-product of the pursuit of excellence and not itself a worthy goal. –Robert Townsend, Former CEO, Avis
The business of America is business. – Calvin Coolidge
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. –George Santayana
The gods cannot help one who loses opportunities. –Mencius
Don’t be afraid when you have no other choice. – Yiddish Proverb
Make every decision as if you owned the whole company. – Robert Townsend, Former CEO, Avis
Often you have to rely on your intuition. –Bill Gates
No gain without pain. –Ben Franklin
By working faithfully for eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost
A resume is a balance sheet without any liabilities. – Robert Half
You are your first product, so positioning yourself in the market as an individual is extremely important. – Portia Isaacson
[Mr. President, how did you become a war hero?] It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat. –JFK
The secret of business is not who you know. It’s what you know. –TV ad for the Wall Street Journal
There’s always room at the top. –Daniel Webster
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later. – Harold Geneen, CEO, IT&T
Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour, or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you’re just sitting still? – Jean Paul Getty, Chairman, Getty Oil Co.
To be a manager, you have to start at the bottom- no exceptions. – Henry Block, CEO, H&R Block
It takes twenty years to make an overnight success. –Eddie Cantor
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different. – Coco Chanel
I don’t know any CEO who doesn’t love numbers. –Jeffrey Silverman, CEO Ply Gem Industries
You don’t need an MBA from Harvard to figure out how to lose money. – Royal Little, Founder, Texatron
Creativity is great-but not in accounting. –Charles Scott, CEO, Intermark
Whatever you have, spend less. –Samuel Johnson
Any jackass can draw up a balanced budget. –Lane Kirkland, President AFL-CIO
He that lost his credit is dead to the world. –George Herbert
Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good money. –Thomas Gresham, English financier
If you can only cover costs, capitalism is irrelevant. –Ernest F. Cooke.
Money is like an arm or a leg- use it or lose it. –Henry Ford
All my life people have said I wasn’t going to make it. –Ted Turner