Serve to Lead Leadership Quotations

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. 

—Emile Zola

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 short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.  

—Theodore Roosevelt

Words with me are instruments. I wish to impress upon the people to whom I talk that I am sincere, that I mean exactly what I say, and that I stand for the things that are elemental in civilization.

—Theodore Roosevelt

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.  

—Scaramouche [Rafael Sabatini]

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

—Benjamin Franklin

Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

—Proverbs 27:17

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.  

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.

— Millard Fuller

A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a dangerous man who has it under control.

—Jordan Peterson

Asquith of course he was a very clever man, in the lawyer’s type of cleverness, by which I mean that I don’t think he was very good at finding out what was right, but he was very good at making out a case for whatever he wanted to make out a case for. He was bit loose no doubt in his ways of going on.

—Bertrand Russell

The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage.  

—Thucydides

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.

— St. Catherine of Siena

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. . . By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves.  

—Robert Louis Stevenson

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

—Ernest Hemingway

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear, nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings. How can life grant us boon of living, compensate for dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate, unless we dare the soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay with courage to behold the restless day and count it fair.  

—Amelia Earhart

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.  

—Helen Keller

Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

 —Gustave Flaubert

Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.  

—Ashleigh Brilliant 

One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of the necessary ingredients of happiness–simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.  

—George Sand

What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.  

—Tom Robbins

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

—Joseph Campbell

It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person.

—Lewis Carroll

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.

—Rumi

Truth is life. 

—Frank Lloyd Wright

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.  

—George Orwell

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

—Voltaire

You might very well think that. But I couldn’t possibly comment.

—Francis Uruqart [‘House of Cards’]

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

—T.S. Eliot

Remember this lesson. History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. People get the history they deserve.   

 —Charles de Gaulle

Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

—Victor Hugo

The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.