People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.
Oliver Goldsmith

Hear the meaning within the word.
William Shakespeare

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, 
is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

No great man ever complains of want of opportunities.
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Thomas Jefferson

Never neglect an opportunity for improvement.
Sir William Jones

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
Earl of Beaconsfield

He who hesitates is lost.
Proverb

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.
Voltaire

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration.
Evan Esar

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes.

St. Clement of Alexandra

We are still masters of our fate.
We are still captains of our souls.
Winston Churchill

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men's best successes come after their disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No man is an island.
John Donne

Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
Josh Billings

Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.
Samuel Smiles