Zig Ziglar

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.

Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.

When you catch a glimpse of your potential, that’s when passion is born.

Getting up and moving forward is a choice.

Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

We all acquire damage as infants and children and we work on removing those scars all of our lives. You won’t heal everything, but what’s important is the work.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

We can aim to create a culture, where kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That’s what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep… Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We’d go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I’ve always been a big animal person.

As a kid, I was making a building with blocks in our playroom. I didn’t have enough. So I asked my younger brother Robert if I could borrow some of his. He said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I used all of my blocks, then all of his blocks, and when I was done I had a great building, which I then glued together. Robert never did get those blocks back.

I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I’ve improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.