Quotes About Motivation

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

We should remember the wise adage that goals (or commandments, in this case) are stars to guide us and not sticks with which to beat ourselves.

No shortage in terrorists, Grant observed grimly. They came in all dimensions: groups of political fanatics with blind obedience and perverted social conscience; the trained assassin tracking down their victim in a peaceful Austrian village; a boy in a quiet Washington street killing on vicious impulse. All of them, however different they seemed, bent on destruction. All of them, however motivated, with total contempt for human life.

He had drive and hunger somewhere, like a phantom limb, agitating faintly away in his gut. He'd been an ambitious young man, he'd gotten drunk just looking at the constantly changing face of the churning, radiant world.

Employees are not productive because they are satisfied; they are satisfied because they are productive. High satisfaction is the result of high performance, not the cause of it.

Time pressure may drive people to get more done, but it causes them to think less creatively." This same effect can be seen in teams.

Individuals with a higher degree of confidence work harder, persist longer, are more optimistic and enthusiastic, show more grit and determination, and choose more difficult and higher goals than those with less confidence.

If the urge to be entertained so much, to travel so much, to buy so much, and to arm ourselves so much no longer motivated our behavior, could our society as it is today still function?

We wonder if we serve better than someone else. We import a drive to achieve into our works of mercy.

Love is the motivating principle by which the Lord leads us along the way towards becoming like Him, our perfect example. Our way of life, hour by hour, must be filled with the love of God and love for others.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain.

The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in the mind

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get a good job, but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit until we have so conducted that we feel like new men in the old.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

lET HIM MARCH TO THE MUSIC HE HEARS

Non conosco nulla di più incoraggiante dell'incontestabile capacità dell'uomo di elevare la propria vita con uno sforzo cosciente.

for the devil finds employment for the idle

It is to be remembered that by good deeds or words you encourage yourself, who always have need to witness or hear them.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated.