Founders' wisdom
Ninety-nine sentences for anyone starting something — on courage, persistence, mistakes and the right moment.
Reason can tell us what to refrain from, but the heart can tell us what we must do.
Joseph Joubert
The quickest way to grow old is to dismiss new ideas without judging them.
Unknown
The truth of an intention is the deed.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
One learns more easily from defeats than from victories.
Gustav Stresemann
Quality of life rises where the legs are used a little more and the elbows a little less.
Erhard Eppler
When you face an important decision, imagine you were lying on your deathbed.
Ignatius von Loyola
Character is the main thing. It must stand as firm as a rock, for everything rests on that foundation.
Iwan Turgenjew
In the first half of our lives we ruin our health to get at money. In the second half we spend most of the money to get our health back.
Voltaire
Happiness often comes in through a door you did not know you had left open.
John Barrymore
What moves the heart sets the feet in motion.
From Rwanda
Composure sharpens the eye for what matters.
From China
Every mistake looks incredibly stupid when someone else makes it.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
One should allow oneself some rest. We rise from a pause more capable and more alive.
Seneca
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Whoever goes walking unaccompanied comes back accompanied by many thoughts.
Ernst R. Hauschka
Do not walk only the smooth roads. Take paths no one has taken, so that you leave traces and not merely dust.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
From time to time one should step back from oneself, as a painter steps back from his picture.
Christian Morgenstern
Doing important things by halves is next to worthless, for it is usually the other half that counts.
Emil Oesch
Every day is a small life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Whoever prepares for the worst overcomes the fear of it and can think clearly again.
Andrew Carnegie
To the one who does small things as if they were great, God gives the grace to do great things as if they were small.
Rudolf Kögel
The most important thing is never to stop beginning.
Albert Einstein
Good works are accomplished not by force but by perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
It is a great advantage in life to make the mistakes you can learn from as early as possible.
Winston Churchill
To share sorrow takes only a human being; to share joy takes an angel.
Jean Paul
If you are so careful that you constantly watch out not to fall, you will certainly trip over something.
Gertrude Stein
The only thing one should do behind another’s back is pat them kindly on the shoulder.
Euripides
Having people’s respect at all times is worth more than their occasional admiration.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Better to lose money than trust.
Robert Bosch
Chopping wood is so popular because you see the result of the work at once.
Albert Einstein
The greatest difficulty in the world is not getting people to accept new ideas, but getting them to forget the old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
I do not understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I am afraid of the old ones.
John Cage
All beings strive for the good, yet not all recognise the true.
Thomas von Aquin
You can tell how far a character has matured by the delicacy of its consideration for others.
Johannes Messner
You preach more by what you are than by what you say.
From Africa
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit on nothing but our own backside.
Michel de Montaigne
Victory goes to the one who knows when to fight and when not to.
General Sunzi
The hardest thing in life is getting the heart and the head to work together.
Woody Allen
To cover a mistake with a lie is to replace a stain with a hole.
Aristoteles
Whoever makes a mistake and does not correct it commits a second one.
Konfuzius
And in any case — even the smallest act of creation stands higher than talk about what has been created.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Steady faithfulness in small things is a great and heroic virtue.
Bonaventura
We should do the ordinary uncommonly well.
Philipp Neri
It is too late to dig wells when the thirst is already burning.
Max Weber
It is worse to lose a good name than never to have had one.
Irische Volksweisheit
Natural intelligence can replace almost any degree of education, but no education can replace natural intelligence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
No advance is as hard as the one back towards reason.
Bertolt Brecht
The man who builds the violin is thanked by the sound alone.
Friedrich der Große
Afterwards, even a fool is wise.
Homer
We are responsible not only for what we do, but also for what we do not do.
Molière
To have imagination is not to think something up — it is to make something of the things at hand.
Thomas Mann
A person always receives as much strength as they need, but only once they need it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A golden rule: do not judge people by their opinions, but by what those opinions make of them.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I do not understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I am afraid of the old ones.
John Cage
Since we can only make ourselves understood to one another through the word, whoever falsifies it betrays the human community.
Michel de Montaigne
I do not pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.
Robert Bosch
Problems can never be solved with the same way of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein
The purest form of madness is to leave everything as it is and at the same time hope that something will change.
Albert Einstein
He kept polishing himself and ended up blunt before he was ever sharp.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
This too is art, a gift of God: to carry so much light in your heart from a few sunlit days that the glow remains long after the summer has gone.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Success is a by-product; it must never become the goal.
Gustave Flaubert
Think once before you give, twice before you accept, and a thousand times before you ask.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
We are responsible not only for what we do, but also for what we do not do.
Moliere
What is harder than rock and softer than water? And yet water wears away the hard rock. Persistently.
Ovid
What is self-evident is thought about least of all.
Max Weber
The man who moved the mountain was the one who began carrying away the small stones.
From China
Ideas do not keep. Something must be done with them.
Alfred North Whitehead
Speak only when you are asked, but live in such a way that you are asked.
Paul Claudel
The noblest way of gaining insight is through reflection and consideration.
Buddha
To make the best possible of every moment of life, whichever hand of fate it falls to us from, the favourable as much as the unfavourable — in that lies the art of living, and the true privilege of a reasoning being.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The self-assured turn problems into opportunities. The insecure do the opposite.
Volksweisheit
To paint is not to colour forms, but to form colours.
Henri Matisse
In the choice of one’s enemies one cannot be careful enough.
Oscar Wilde
Economics is the only field in which two researchers receive the Nobel Prize for finding out exactly the opposite.
Paul Krugman
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
In the choice of one’s enemies one cannot be careful enough.
Oscar Wilde
You will only find the way if you set out on it.
Maria (Mary) Ward
Keeping your balance is the most successful movement in life.
Friedl Beutelrock
A person’s deeds are the consequence of their principles. If the principles are wrong, the deeds will not be right.
Bernhard Lichtenberg
Whoever wants to reach the other bank must cross the river one way or another. So why wait?
Native American proverb
When a person sets their mind to something, more is possible than one believes.
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Whoever looks only at what is will never know what is possible.
Chinese wisdom
A person who makes no mistakes usually makes nothing at all.
Edward John Phelps
Whoever always does what they can already do will always remain what they already are.
Henry Ford
If the advice is good, it does not matter who gave it.
Thomas Fuller, britischer Historiker
Our incomes are like our shoes: too small and they pinch; too large and they make us stumble and fall.
John Locke
Whoever has a why can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is great folly to want to be clever all on your own.
La Rochefoucauld
Man makes even the deserts bloom. The only desert still resisting him is the one inside his head.
Ephraim Kishon
The perfection of a clock lies not in running fast, but in running right.
Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
Small steps are better than no steps.
Willy Brandt
Raise your eyes and you see no borders.
Japanese proverb
Almost every great step I have taken in my development I owe to some mistake or other.
Gordon Mac Donald
In a rolling ship it is the one standing still who falls over, not the one who moves.
Ludwig Börne
Have the courage to use your own understanding.
Immanuel Kant
It is a bad thing to notice that you have no friends only when you need them.
Plutarch
Many realise too late that on the ladder of success you can skip a few rungs — but only on the way down.
William Somerset Maugham
Whoever has reached the end can start from the beginning, for the end is the beginning seen from the other side.
Karl Valentin