“Josh Billings once wrote, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him. It’s what he knows what ain’t true.”

“Josh Billings wrote, “It’s not what a man knows that hurts him; it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”

“...you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being. ”

“The ability to concentrate singlemindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book.

“Excellence/Perfection is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends.”

“You are fully responsible for everything you are, everything you have and everything you become.”

“Courage is a habit that is learned by acting courageously whenever the quality of courage is required.”

“By the yard it's hard, but inch by inch, anything's a cinch A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step In addition, to keep your energy levels at their highest, be careful  about what you eat. Start the day with a high protein, low fat and  low carbohydrate breakfast. Eat saladswith fish or chicken at lunch.  Avoid sugar, salt, white flour products or deserts. Avoid soft drinks  and candy bars or pastries. Feed yourself as you would feed a world  class athlete before a competition, because in many respects, that’s  what you are before starting work each day”

“Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing  difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is  simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.”

“You perform at your highest potential only when you are focusing on the most valuable use of your time. This is the key to personal and business success. It is the central issue in personal efficiency and time management. You must always be asking yourself, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? Discipline yourself to work exclusively on the one task that, at any given time, is the answer to this question. Keep yourself on track and focused on your most important responsibilities by asking yourself, over and over, What is the most valuable use of my time right now? How you can apply this law immediately: 1. Remember that you can do only one thing at a time. Stop and think before you begin. Be sure that the task you do is the highest-value use of your time. Remind yourself that anything else you do while your most important task remains undone is a relative waste of time. 2. Be clear about the most valuable work that you do for your organization. Whatever it is, resolve to concentrate on doing that specific task before anything else. Why are you on the payroll? What specific, tangible, measurable results are expected of you? And of all the different results you are capable of achieving, which are the most important to your career at this moment? Whatever the answer, this is where you must focus your energies, and nowhere else.”

“You have within you,right now,everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.”

“I found that every single successful person I’ve ever spoken to had a turning point and the turning point was where they made a clear, specific, unequivocal decision that they were not going to live like this anymore. Some people make that decision at 15 and some people make it at 50 and most never make it at all.”

“No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from  scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who  have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve  our goals.”

“The greatest problem of human life is fear. It is fear that robs us of happiness. It is fear that causes us to settle for far less than we are capable of. It is fear that is the root cause of negative emotions, unhappiness and problems in human relationships.”

“Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior. Visualize yourself as the person you intend to be in the future. Your self-image, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. All improvement in your outer life begins with improvements in your mental pictures, on the inside.”