doing your best

Our deeds determine us,
as much as we determine our deeds.

— George Eliot

Persistence is the twin sister of excellence.
One is a matter of quality;
the other, a matter of time.

— Marabel Morgan

Example is not the main thing in influencing others.
It is the only thing.

— Albert Schweitzer

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

— Edmund Hillary

How a person masters his fate
is more important than what his fate is.

— Wilhelm von Humboldt

When I do good
I feel good.
When I do bad
I feel bad.
And that’s my religion.

— Abraham Lincoln

If you haven’t got the time to do it right,
when will you find the time to do it over?

— Jeffery J. Mayer

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.

— Voltaire

Always do right.
This will gratify some people
and astonish the rest.

— Mark Twain

Things turn out best for the people
who make the best out of the way things turn out.

— Art Linkletter

Do what you can with what you have where you are.

— Theodore Roosevelt

A fellow can’t keep people
from having a bad opinion of him,
but he can keep them from being right about it.

— unknown

People grow through experience
if they meet life honestly and courageously.
This is how character is built.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

There is only one corner of the universe
you can be certain of improving,
and that’s your own self.

— Aldous Huxley

The way to gain a good reputation
is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

— Socrates

A professional is a person who can do his best
at a time when he doesn’t particularly feel like it.

— Alistair Cooke

If you wish to be great at all,
you must begin where you are
and with what you are.
He who would be great anywhere
must first be great
in his own Philadelphia.  

— Russel H. Conwell

Keep away from people
who try to belittle your ambitions.
Small people always do that,
but the really great make you feel
that you, too, can become great.

— Mark Twain

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

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

The only lifelong, reliable motivations
are those that come from within,
and one of the strongest of those
is the joy and pride
that grow from knowing
that you’ve just done something
as well as you can do it.

— Lloyd Dobens and Clare Crawford-Mason

Better a diamond with a flaw
than a pebble without.

— Confucius