Harriet Beecher Stowe

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Sir Winston Churchill

Never give in. Never. Never. Never. Never.

If you're going through hell, keep going.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Japanese proverb

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

Mary Pickford

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Thomas Edison

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward....

Christopher Reeve

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

Nelson Mandela

It always seems impossible until it's done.

The greatest glory in living lies in not never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

William Dempster Hoard

Happiness doesn't depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel toward what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much.

Zig Ziglar

Failure is an event, never a person.

Dolly Parton

If you want the rainbow, then you've gotta put up with the rain.

Jane Addams

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

Marian Wright Edelman

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Mary Kay Ash

Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway.

John Quincy Adams

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

Herodotus

Some give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.

Franklin D Roosevelt

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

Dale Carnegie

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Barack Obama

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today - with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.

Don Quixote

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Henri Nouwen

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Mohandas K Gandhi

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Robert Fulghum

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge - myth is more potent than history - dreams are more powerful than facts - hope always triumphs over experience - laughter is the cure for grief - love is stronger than death.

Theodore Roosevelt

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 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. (Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910)

Will Smith (from The Legend of Bagger Vance)

The game cannot be won, only played.

William Shakespeare

There is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to a man, it's what he does with what happens to him.

Lao Tzu

The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

Katherine Paterson

Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who, with open minds and hearts, seek out connections.

Peyton Conway March

There is a wonderful law of nature that the three things we crave most in life - happiness, freedom and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else.

Stephen Covey

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.

J. Willard Marriott

Good timber does not grow with ease, the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees.

Oliver Goldsmith

Our greatest glory consists not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

Marianne Williamson (but often attributed to speech made by Nelson Mandela)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important.

A Ballade of Suicide

The gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall;

I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

But just as all the neighbours on the wall

Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"

The strangest whim has seized me... After all

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay

My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall

I see a little cloud all pink and grey

Perhaps the rector's mother will NOT call

I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall

That mushrooms could be cooked another way

I never read the works of Juvenal

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing-day;

The decadents decay; the pedants pall;

And H.G. Wells has found that children play,

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;

Rationalists are growing rational

And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,

So secret that the very sky seems small

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

ENVOI

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,

The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;

Even to-day your royal head may fall

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

By G.K. Chesterton