Count your age by friends, count your life by smiles. / You have to wake up in order for your dreams to come true. / Never insult a crocodile until you’ve crossed the river. / If you don’t lie down no one can walk on you. / If you think things improve with age attend a class reunion. / A good scare is sometimes worth more to a man than good advice. / Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes. / We have two ears and one mouth, Think twice, speak once! / You’re never fully dressed until you wear a smile. / It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. / The greatest mistake you can make is to be afraid of making one. / Happiness is the journey not the destination. / People with goals succeed because they know where they are going. / Look at life through the windshield not the rear view mirror. / To succeed do the best you can, where you are, with what you have. / Don’t let your voice mail be “voice jail” to your callers. / A man without humour is like a car without shock absorbers. / Wisdom is what’s left over after we smarten up. / Many people quit looking for work when they finally get a job. / About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age. / Don’t wait for your ship to come in – swim out to it. / Talk less – Say more. / Autograph your work with quality. / You can only control two things your attitude and your activity. / Remember, there’s nothing more constant than change. / If you tell the truth sooner or later somebody’s going to find out. / Experience is the one thing you can’t get on easy payments. / All play and no work, does not work. / A goal is a dream with a deadline. / Dream of worthy accomplishments and stay awake to achieve them. / The only place success comes before work is the dictionary. / You can be happy without needing others to agree with you. / You are not late until you get there. / Glory comes from daring to begin. / Have a back bone not a wish bone. / Give your troubles to God, He will be up all night anyway. / The greater part of progress is the desire to progress. / Happiness is the place between too little and too much. / Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. / Destiny is not a matter of chance it’s a matter of choice. / Your children need your presence more than your presents. / Each of us has two ends a sitting end and a thinking end, Success depends on which we use. / Many spend half the time wishing for things they could have if they didn’t spend half the time wishing. / For every person who climbs the ladder of success there are a dozen waiting for the elevator. / God works with you, not for you. / If your dreams turn to dust vacuum. / Do it now, you become successful the very moment you start. / People may doubt what you say but they will believe what you do. / Success -Don’t do what you like, Like what you do. / Happiness is a choice not a response.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often. / Success is … more attitude than aptitude. / Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important. / If you can laugh at it then you can live with it. / If you must cry over spilled milk then please try to condense it. / It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it. / Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image. / Make friends before you need them. / A friend walks in when everyone else walks out. / The smallest good deed is better than the grandest intention. / Our favorite attitude should be gratitude. / The greatest of all faults is to imagine you have none. / Too many of us speak twice before we think. / Everyone has 20/20 hindsight. / It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. / It is no crime not to be perfect. / If others have sinned you need not mention it. / No man knows less than the man who knows it all. / Patience carries a lot of wait. / One who lacks courage to start has already finished. / A quitter never wins, a winner never quits. / Break a bad habit – Drop it. / Don’t learn safety rules simply by accident. / Failing to prepare, we prepare to fail. / Past failures are guideposts for future success. / There is no right way to do a wrong thing. / Don’t think there are no crocodiles just because the water is calm. / There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm. / Seek joy in what you give not in what you get. / Procrastination is the thief of time. / Success comes in cans – failure comes in can’ts. / Anger is one letter short of danger / 2/3 of promotion is motion. / Having a sharp tongue can cut your own throat. / Life is what happens while you are making other plans. / A person of words and not deeds is like a garden full of weeds. / It’s better to be trusted than liked: underpromise – overperform. / All the flowers of tomorrow are in the seeds of today. / You always pass failure on the way to success. / Don’t let lack of praise nip you in the bud. / The surest way to go broke is to sit around and wait for a break. / The only thing worse than an alarm going off is the one that doesn’t. / Growing old is when fun is a lot more work. / An ego trip won’t get you anywhere. / The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is just that little extra. / If you want the rainbow you gotta put up with the rain. / A natural tendency is to want to be understood rather than understand. / Keep your heart a little softer than your head. / Feed your faith and doubt will starve to death. / The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

They certainly do not have the “weightiness” of those traditional aphorisms from ancient Greece and the Enlightenment Period, but there still is an element of truth twisted into modern-day maxims. However, here is an entertaining list of modern principles and maxims.

The pursuit of happiness is the chase of a lifetime. / The road to success is always under construction. / A turtle makes progress when it sticks its neck out. / Failure is the path of least persistence. / Hard work is the yeast that raises the dough. / Patience is counting down without blasting off. / Have a backbone not a wishbone. / Life is not no much a matter of position as of disposition. / If you don’t care where you’re going any road will get you there. / A pint of example is worth a gallon of advice. / He who throws mud loses ground. / Nobody raises his own reputation by lowering others. / Nothing ruins the truth like stretching it. / A smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks. / Ideas won’t work unless you do. / The future is purchased by the present. / One thing you can’t recycle is wasted time. / Lost time is never found again. / A hard thing about business is minding your own. / Triumph is just “umph” added to try. / Caution is not cowardly, carelessness is not courage. / He who forgives ends the quarrel. / Children need more models than critics. / Frogs have it easy – they can eat what bugs them. / If the going gets easy you may be going downhill. / Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else get your way. / The best vitamin for making friends, B-1. / Jumping to conclusions can be bad exercise. / The best labor saving device is doing it tomorrow. / Some folks won’t look up until they are flat on their backs. / If you want your dreams to come true, don’t oversleep. / Birds have bills too and they keep on singing. / A good example is the best sermon. / The Ten Commandments are not multiple choice. / Well done! is better than, Well said! / Minds are like parachutes – they function only when open. / Live as you wish your kids would. / Swallowing your pride seldom leads to indigestion. / People don’t fail, they give up. / When looking for faults use a mirror, not a telescope. / Smile, it takes only 13 muscles – a frown takes 64. / Kindness, a language deaf people can hear and blind can see. / Heaviest thing to carry – a grudge. / We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves. / Tact is the ability to see others as they wish to be seen. / A bad conscience has a very good memory. / One thing you can give and still keep – is your word. / A smooth sea never made a skillful sailor. / A small leak can sink a great ship. / You can’t direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

(ed. – Do yourself a favour. Bookmark this page of Ayn Rand musings. When everything seems off-kilter, reread.)

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• All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.
• The question isn’t who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.
• Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.
• The most depraved type of human being . . . (is) the man without a purpose.
• All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it – walk.
• You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
• Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.
• If a society is to remain free, its government must be controlled.
• America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.
• Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.
• Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
• Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
• Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life.
• The problem is not those who dream, but those who can only dream.
• Either we believe that the State exists to serve the individual or that the individual exists to serve the state.
• Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
• The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life – by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality…
• The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
• A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil is evil, finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good.
• There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR & GR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Here are a dozen quotes from perhaps our greatest, modern-day genius.

• Imagination is more important than knowledge; for knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.
• The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing.
• Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
• The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
• Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
• The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
• Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
• If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.

There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.

Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Never, never, never give up.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a tremendous whack.

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Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has formed the core notions of many of our great intellects from the 1800’s. He influenced his American contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James, as well as notable thinkers the stature of Friedrich Nietzsche, and more recently Harold Bloom and Barack Obama. Once asked to sum up his work, Emerson said his central thought was “the infinitude of the private man.”

Here are more of the BGJ’s 100 favourite Emerson quotes (tomorrow our top-ten RWE):

• Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
• Character is that which can do without success.
• Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
• Self-trust is the first secret of success.
• The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
• For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
• Shallow men believe in luck, wise and strong men in cause and effect.
• Skill to do comes of doing.
• No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
• He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king, rich man, fairy, or demon who possesses such power as that.
• A day is a miniature eternity.
• Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.
• The only gift is a portion of thyself.
• The only way to have a friend is to be one.
• A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

One side note: When Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau, he asked Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” The question went on to have a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau – and today we have the benefit of reading Thoreau’s intimate evolution of personal feelings and thought. Emerson kept a journal throughout his life and his works are contained in 16 large volumes. Today’s scholars consider the journal to be Emerson’s key literary work.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Through this week By George Journal is posting one hundred of our favourite quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson – a deep, provocative 19th century author and, we believe, one of the most remarkable of thinkers of our modern age. Here are the next 25 RWE-gems to reflect upon:

•  The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
• The first wealth is health.
• A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
• Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
• The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.
• Sanity is very rare; every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.
• There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who want something more; that of the sick, who want something different; and that of the traveler, who says, “Anywhere but here.”
• Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.
• When there is no vision, people perish.
• Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
• Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.
• Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.
• The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
• Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times. They wish, as Pindar said, to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.
• Every man is a borrower and a mimic; life is theatrical and literature a quotation.
• We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.
• The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.
• Five great enemies to peace inhabit us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
• As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.
• No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
• A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
• Whatever limits us we call Fate.
• Patience and fortitude conquer all things.
• All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet and lecturer. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a founding father of the Transcendentalist movement (expressed first in his 1836 essay Nature). Emerson authored dozens of published essays and conducted more than 1,500 public lectures across the U.S. through the mid-1800s.  He wrote on the core ideas of individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding natural world.

Here are 25 more bons mots of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• Make yourself necessary to somebody.
• With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
• This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.
• The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
• Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
• The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
• To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
• Difficulties exist to be surmounted.
• Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you.
• The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.
• The only reward of virtue is virtue.
• Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
• The world belongs to the energetic.
• Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.
• Hitch your wagon to a star.
• Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.
• Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live.
• We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
• Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
• A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
• The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.
• Give all to love; obey thy heart.
• All mankind love a lover.
• All men are poets at heart.
• Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.

This week the By George Journal salutes Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who is argumentatively the greatest, modern day thinker and wordsmith of our ages. Each morning, we will bring readers remarkable quotes from this remarkable man – leading to Friday’s list of our “Top-Ten RWE Insights.”

BGJ has chosen a hundred of our favourite gems. Today, here  are 25 of our top-100 Emerson quotes.

• We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly in to the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
• Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
• The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.
• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
• We acquire the strength we have overcome.
• Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires … courage.
• There are some men above grief and some men below it.
• God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both.
• When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits; on his manhood; he has gained the facts; learned his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.
• Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
• Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
• People only see what they are prepared to see.
• The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
• What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
• Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.
• A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
• Sorrow makes us all children again.
• Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.
• For what avail the plough or sail, Or land, or life, if freedom fail?
• We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?
• We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates.
• Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
• Pictures must not be too picturesque.
• The surest poison is time.
• It is doubtless a vice to turn one’s eyes inward too much, but I am my own comedy and tragedy.

Chris George, providing reliable PR counsel and effective advocacy. Need a go-to writer and experienced communicator? 613-983-0801 @ CG&A COMMUNICATIONS.