Quotes About Opportunity

If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

Every morning is a beginning, a fresh start, and a man needn't be hog-tied to the past. Whatever went before, a man's life can begin now, today.

Never can tell when you might come on somebody needs skinning.

This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions.

That was always the trouble…everything a man wanted to do lay ahead of him.

We were young then, and the West was young, with the land broad and bright before us. We knew, whatever the truth was, that every horse could be ridden, every man whipped, every girl loved.

This was a big country needing big men and women to live in it, and there was no place out here for the frightened or the mean.

it is better to eat when one can, for one never knows when he will eat again.

And as far as trails go, there's always an open trail for the mind if you keep the doors open and give it a chance.

Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You

The way I see it, every time a man gets up in the morning he starts his life over, Sure, the bills are there to pay, and the job is there to do, but you don't have to stay in a pattern. You can always start over, saddle a fresh horse and take another trail. ~Kearney McRaven

street. He had gone to his room in the Rest and had taken a brief nap. From boyhood he had slept when there was opportunity and eaten when he found time. He had taken time to shave and change his shirt, thinking all the while. The

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.

is a fair land, Darby, but a raw, rough land that will use up men until it breeds the kind it needs. Well, I will be used, and I hope to have a hand in the breeding, too.

How often it is that a whim may alter the course of our existences! How often the simple decision whether to go right or left when one leaves a doorway can change so much! A man may turn to the right and walk straightaway into all manner of evil, and to the left, all manner of good.

There will be a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

For there are, in the affairs of men and nations, inexorable tides from which they cannot remain aloof. If they do not enter upon them prepared, they will be caught unprepared, and at the wrong time.

There is no reason why anyone cannot get an education if he or she wants it badly enough and is persistent.

You tried. You're too decent a man, Felton—they don't operate that way. They take decency for weakness, and weakness represents opportunity to them. You're a good man, but you've lived too long in an orderly civilization. It's different out here in the open.

Many times the first man to move was the first to die

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

There is no good time in which to die