Noah Webster Quotes

Even if people just change two or three things that they are able to sustain over time, it makes quite a difference eventually.

Know your priorities and identify the five powerful action steps that you intend to take to move your initiatives forward each day. If you go to a tree with an ax and take five whacks at the tree every day, it doesn't matter if it's an oak or a redwood; eventually, the tree has to fall down.

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

We haven't rushed to set up targets, either in business or in football. Our goal was to understand how to act and then to move gradually.

If you do something every day a little, the end is going to be big.

Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo. (The drop excavates the stone, not with force but by falling often.)

The only way things will happen is if people get over the notion that they must see immediate success. If they get over that notion and persist, then they will see things happen before they even realize it.

There is no substitute for work. Worthwhile results come from hard work and careful planning.

You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.

For great things do not done just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

Remember to dream big, think long-term, underachieve on a daily basis, and take baby steps. That is the key to long-term success.

People frequently fail when they try to do everything at once. They approach a massive project and quickly get discouraged. Taking small, but high-value steps takes less time, and you learn more in the long run.

The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

To mobilize yourself, decide what you want, determine what will get you what you want, then act - do what will get you what you want most to achieve.

When I hear a company is being run by a team, my heart sinks, because you need to have that leader with a vision and heart that can move things forward.

The great art to learn much is to undertake a little at a time.

Wait with patience and love and strength. If helpers are not ready now, they will come in time. Why should we be in a hurry? The real working force of all great work is in its almost unperceived beginnings.

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

As history has demonstrated many times over, change may arrive slowly or quickly but it is the one constant, in one form or another, on which we can all count.

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

The modification of prejudice takes a long time, and occurs as the result of a thousand things that happen to the prejudiced person - things he sees and hears and reads, people he talks to, and places he visits. Any given reformer must be content to take a small and obscure place in a chain of cumulative pressures.

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

Anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. Leaders who are good navigators are capable of taking their people just about anywhere.

If we want to cook food we need to leave the stove on continuously and not keep turning it on and off. If the heat is continuous, no matter whether it is high or low our food will eventually be cooked. Similarly, if we continuously apply effort, even if it is only a small effort, it is certain that we shall eventually experience the fruits of our practice.