Inspirational - Quotation#42

All things are difficult before they are easy.

Dr. Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

Inspirational - Quotation#41

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

P. B. Medawar (1915 - )

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot (1826 - 1877)

Inspirational - Quotation#40

Do something. If it doesn't work, do something else. No idea is too crazy.

Jim Hightower, The New York Times, March 9, 1986

Inspirational - Quotation#39

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.

Hyman Rickover (1900 - 1986)

Inspirational - Quotation#38

This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action - I will write it out.

Hortense Calisher

Inspirational - Quotation#37

Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)

Inspirational - Quotation#36

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

Inspirational - Quotation#35

Equal opportunity means everyone will have a fair chance at being incompetent.

Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)

He was an educator and "hierarchiologist," best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle.

He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963.

In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California.

He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of the The Peter Principle, in which he states: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."

Another notable quotation of his is that the "noblest of all dogs is the hot-dog; it feeds the hand that bites it."^[1]

From 1985 to his death in 1990, Dr. Peter attended and was involved in management of the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Humboldt County, California. He proposed an award for the race, titled "The Golden Dinosaur Award" which has been handed out every year since to the first sculptural machine to utterly break down immediately after the start.

Inspirational - Quotation#34

Destiny is no matter of chance.

It is a matter of choice.

It is not a thing to be waited for,

it is a thing to be achieved.

William Jennings Bryan (1860 - 1925)

He was the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States in 1896, 1900 and 1908, a lawyer, and the 41st United States Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson. One of the most popular speakers in American history, he was noted for a deep, commanding voice.

Inspirational - Quotation#33

I have failed many times, and that's why I am a success.

I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying.

Michael Jordan

Inspirational - Quotation#32

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.

Anatole France (1844 - 1924)

Medical anomaly

Anatole France had a brain just two-thirds the normal size, but this had no recorded effect on his life in any way.

Early life

The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books. His father's bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day. Anatole France studied at the Collège Stanislas and after graduation he helped his father by working at his bookstore. After several years he secured the position of a cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre. In 1876 he was appointed a librarian for the French Senate.

Literary career

Anatole France began his career as a poet and a journalist. He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881).

He was elected to the Académie française in 1896.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. He died in 1924 and is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris.

Inspirational - Quotation#31

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963),
speech in Dublin, Ireland, June 28, 1963

Inspirational - Quotation#30

My work is a game, a very serious game.

M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Inspirational - Quotation#29

Mistakes, obviously,
show us what needs improving.
Without mistakes,
how would we know what we had to work on?

Peter McWilliams