Quotes About Motivation

Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt," one biographer has suggested, "is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition

Privilege can stunt ambition, just as the lack of privilege can fire ambition.

When they returned home, he took his young son aside. "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should," he admonished. "You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." Teedie responded immediately, according to Corinne, giving his

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

How did the team accomplish so much, so quickly, and for so long? The answers require an appreciation of Johnson's unsurpassed work ethic, the feeling among staff members that they were learning important skills, and the sense of shared engagement in a significant mission.

Regardless of one's impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

Act like you're talking to those folks," he counseled his students. "Look one of them in the eye and then move on and look another one in the eye." During competitions, he utilized all his supple array of gestures and facial expressions to cue and prompt—now frowning, narrowing his eyes, creasing his brow, shaking his head, gaping in wonder—creating a silent movie to steer and goad his charges to victory.

He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. "That's why I'm a writer.

Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.

I could not have done that. I fear nothing and no one. I respect nothing and no one. But I could not have done that.' 'You have done it,' Jerott said. 'It is easy to do it, out of hatred. But you are right. I know of no one else on earth who could have done it out of love.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality

But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose, said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain? You can usually tell, said Miss de Vine, by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.

Whatever you're doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you're buying, pause and buy something different. Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down.

But once you've got the How, the Why drives it home.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it.

Where do you get the inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea.

Where do you get inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.