Skip to content
Frank Ball writing in his study

The quote library

Frankisms

Short truths, collected over a lifetime of writing and teaching. Read a few, or lose an afternoon.

Collected
224
  • It is better to wear out than rust out. — Millard Fillmore

    inspiration

  • It is by fighting the limitations, temptations, and failures of the world that we reach our highest possibilities. — Helen Keller

    inspiration

  • It is difficulties which show what men are. — Epictetus

    inspiration

  • It is faith which lights us into sustaining realities beyond those perceived by the physical senses. — Helen Keller

    inspiration

  • It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it. — Douglas MacArthur

    inspiration

  • It is hard to spend your life and the best of your imagination, energies, and efforts on something you don’t care about. — Robert Fritz

    inspiration

  • It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three. — Timothy Ferriss

    inspiration

  • It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible. — George Washington

    inspiration

  • It is not doing the thing which we like to do, but liking to do the thing which we have to do, that makes life blessed. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    inspiration

  • It is often better to recognize the inevitable and make it work for you. — Charles Handy

    inspiration

  • It is the wounded oyster that mends its shell with pearl. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

    inspiration

  • It’s not about time. It never was and never is. It’s about energy. — Jim Loehr

    inspiration

  • It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up. — Vince Lombardi

    inspiration

  • Lack of time is actually lack of priorities. — Timothy Ferriss

    inspiration

  • Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. — H. Jackson Brown Jr

    inspiration

  • Let him that would move the world first move himself. — Socrates

    inspiration

  • Letting yourself be bad is the best way to become good. — Jerry Cleaver

    inspiration

  • Limit the number of items on your to-do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae. — Timothy Ferriss

    inspiration

  • Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), A Psalm of Life, st. 7

    inspiration

  • Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. — Michelangelo

    inspiration

  • Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity. — Oprah Winfrey

    inspiration

  • Many performers adopt the strategy of staying within the confines of their current level of competence. They never attempt to accomplish anything that might fail. — Robert Fritz

    inspiration

  • More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent. — Billy Sunday

    inspiration

  • Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. — Timothy Ferriss

    inspiration

  • Multitask when it doesn’t matter. Fully engage when it does. — Jim Loehr

    inspiration

  • My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it. I never did like to work, and I don’t deny it. I’d rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk—anything but work. — Abraham Lincoln

    inspiration

  • My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of the president of the United States. — Harry S. Truman

    inspiration

  • Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. — Timothy Ferriss

    inspiration

  • No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. — Aesop (550 BC), The Lion and the Mouse

    inspiration

  • No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. — André Gide

    inspiration

  • No man knows what he can do till he tries. — Publilius Syrus

    inspiration

  • No one grows by correcting weaknesses. We grow by building on strengths. — Alan Weiss

    inspiration

  • No one’s going to give you a map. You must make your own way. — Jeff Goins

    inspiration

  • No problem is too small to paralyze you, and none is too big to be conquered. — Jerry Cleaver

    inspiration

  • Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrecorded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. — Calvin Coolidge

    inspiration

  • Once you know where you want to go, you have a better chance to design an effective process. — Robert Fritz

    inspiration

  • One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. — André Gide

    inspiration

  • One man with courage makes a majority. — Andrew Jackson

    inspiration

  • One of the chief barriers to accepting God’s generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish. — Julia Cameron

    inspiration

  • One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. — Dan Bennett

    inspiration