Jacob Abbott Quotes

Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture.

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.

Giving every child a chance to reach their full potential is the best work anyone can do

Education should bring to light the ideal of the individual.

Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.

Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress.

I insist that the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation.

Learning is a daily experience and a lifetime mission. I truly believe in the saying "We work to become, not to acquire."

Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous.

Everybody has talent, but ability takes hard work.

In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.

A coach's primary function should be not to make better players, but to make better people

The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.

We ought to be doing all we can to make it possible for every child to fulfill his or her God-given potential.

Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.

Each person's task in life is to become an increasingly better person.

That in the human plan nothing is worth the making if it does not make the man.

It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.

The best way to help a man increase his output is to help build the man. Help him increase his stature as a man, and he will just naturally do better-on the job and off.

The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.

Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.

I feel like with everything you do, everything you make, everything you experience, y'know, even the dumb stuff that you don't even really pay much attention to, like the mundane stuff that happens to you every day, it shapes the person who you are.

Every man's powers have relation to some kind of work; and whenever he finds that kind of work which he can do best--that to which his powers are best adapted--he finds that which will give him the best development, and that by which he can best build up, or make, his manhood.