Zig Ziglar

I was in that part of the class that made the top half possible.

Moving from survival to stability, from stability to success, from success to significance.

The person who dumps garbage into your mind will do you considerably more harm than the person who dumps garbage on your floor, because each load of mind garbage negatively impacts your possibilities and lowers your expectations.

My first professional job was to sell heavy-duty waterless cookware.

Encouragement is the fuel on which hope runs.

If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.

If you can dream it, you can do it. Your limits are all within yourself.

Everything in life is luck.

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

I would say to do you and do you well. Don’t try to be anyone else. Don’t try to emulate what someone is doing. Play to your strengths. Even if you see someone onstage that is killing it, don’t try to do what they’re doing. Just keep doing you.

If you put that effort in, you’ll get what you want.

Lose/Win people bury a lot of feelings. And unexpressed feelings come forth later in uglier ways. Psychosomatic illnesses often are the reincarnation of cumulative resentment, deep disappointment and disillusionment repressed by the Lose/Win mentality. Disproportionate rage or anger, overreaction to minor provocation, and cynicism are other embodiments of suppressed emotion. People who are constantly repressing, not transcending feelings toward a higher meaning find that it affects the quality of their relationships with others.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.

Find the game where you can win, and then commit your life to playing it; and play to win.

I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.

The six people who had the biggest impact on my life were all women. Had I been sexist, my life would have been far less fulfilling.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

I’m really clear about what my life mission is now. There’s no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I’ve returned to the athlete I once was. I’m integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.

You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.