Quotes About Opportunity

Whatever may be said in praise of poverty, the fact remains that it is possible to live a really complete or successful life unless one is rich.

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match,

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.

I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Of equality - As if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself - As if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.

You will carry into eternity the product of your investment in this life. Life is too short and the stakes too high to live mediocre lives.

View every day as a school day and every relationship as an opportunity to learn. There is no such thing as an accidental encounter. Each person you meet has been sent by God for your edification.

In the world today, a young lady who does not have a college education just is not educated.

Action is a business of risk; the real question is the magnitude of that risk.

Life is a school of probability.

If you wait, you grow old, nothing more.

I'm still ready to go to the moon, if they'll take me.

Discrimination is simply the act of choice. Scarcity requires us to choose; scarcity is the cause of discrimination!

Some say it's wrong to profit from the misfortune of others. I ask my students whether they'd support a law against doing so. But I caution them with some examples. An orthopedist profits from your misfortune of having broken your leg skiing. When there's news of a pending ice storm, I doubt whether it saddens the hearts of those in the collision repair business. I also tell my students that I profit from their misfortune—their ignorance of economic theory.

How much of a barrier to self-improvement is discrimination? What kinds of tools are in the ready grasp of those subjected to it? Surely one doesn't want to sit around waiting for the end to discrimination.

Before the do-gooders "helped," they forgot to ask, why would anyone work ten hours per day for the paltry sum of $2 or $3 an hour? Would they have selected such a job if they had superior alternatives? The only conclusion is that the low-paying sweatshop job might be their best alternative. Such a person is indeed unfortunate, but they are by no means made better off by the destruction of that low-paying job.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?