Opportunity Quotations

Authors that have more than 2 quotes: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mignon McLaughlin, Mark Twain

(top)

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

- Diane Ackerman

Woody Allen

(top)

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.

- Woody Allen

Unknown Author

(top)

Don't ever save anything for a special occasion. Being alive is the special occasion.

- Unknown Author

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending.

- Unknown Author

Is there life before death?

- Unknown Author

Later never exists.

- Unknown Author

Opportunities are never lost; someone will take the one you miss.

- Unknown Author

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

- Unknown Author

Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.

- Unknown Author

When it comes time to die, make sure all you got to do is die.

- Unknown Author

When your life flashes before your eyes, make sure you've got plenty to watch.

- Unknown Author

Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers.

- Unknown Author

Present your family and friends with their eulogies now - they won't be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from inside the coffin.

- Unknown Author

Maltbie D. Babcock

(top)

Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them.

- Maltbie D. Babcock

Francis Bacon

(top)

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

- Francis Bacon

Joan Baez

(top)

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

- Joan Baez

Russell Baker

(top)

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

- Russell Baker

Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas

(top)

Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours should not be numbered by years, days, and hours.

- Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas

Charles Baudelaire

(top)

Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.

- Charles Baudelaire

Stephen Vincent Benét

(top)

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

- Stephen Vincent Benét

Bernard Berenson

(top)

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.

- Bernard Berenson

Milton Berle

(top)

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

- Milton Berle

Hector Berlioz

(top)

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

- Hector Berlioz

Napoleon Bonaparte

(top)

Ability is of little account without opportunity.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

Richard Branson

(top)

I have always lived my life by thriving on opportunity and adventure. Some of the best ideas come out of the blue, and you have to keep an open mind to see their virtue.

- Richard Branson

David Brin

(top)

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?

- David Brin

Jean de La Bruyère

(top)

There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

- Jean de La Bruyère

Those who make the worst use of their time most complain of its brevity.

- Jean de La Bruyère

Art Buchwald

(top)

Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.

- Art Buchwald

Warren Buffet

(top)

It is more important to say "no" to an opportunity, than to say "yes".

- Warren Buffet

John Burroughs

(top)

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

- John Burroughs

Charles Buxton

(top)

You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.

- Charles Buxton

Lord Byron

(top)

When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.

- Lord Byron

Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort

(top)

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

- Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort

Lord Chesterfield

(top)

The value of moments, when cast up, is immense, if well employed; if thrown away, their loss is irrevocable.

- Lord Chesterfield

Jean Cocteau

(top)

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

- Jean Cocteau

E.E. Cummings

(top)

though love be a day and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing.

- E.E. Cummings

James Dean

(top)

Dream as if you'll live forever... live as if you'll die today.

- James Dean

Michael Dell

(top)

It's through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we've always mapped our path at Dell. There's always an opportunity to make a difference.

- Michael Dell

Demosthenes

(top)

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

- Demosthenes

Emily Dickinson

(top)

That it will never come again Is what makes life so sweet.

- Emily Dickinson

Annie Dillard

(top)

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

- Annie Dillard

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

- Annie Dillard

Benjamin Disraeli

(top)

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Norman Douglas

(top)

Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?

- Norman Douglas

Thomas Alva Edison

(top)

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

- Thomas Alva Edison

Ralph Waldo Emerson

(top)

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the path of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

(top)

Nothing is so often irretrievably missed as a daily opportunity.

- Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

Martin H. Fischer

(top)

Expect an early death - it will keep you busier.

- Martin H. Fischer

Hamilton Fish

(top)

The question for each man is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.

- Hamilton Fish

Henry Ford

(top)

A set back is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

- Henry Ford

Benjamin Franklin

(top)

Lost time is never found again.

- Benjamin Franklin

You may delay, but time will not.

- Benjamin Franklin

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(top)

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every second is of infinite value.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Benjamin Graham

(top)

I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.

- Benjamin Graham

Terri Guillemets

(top)

Stop waiting. Twenty years is the first bomb of the future.

- Terri Guillemets

Sydney J. Harris

(top)

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

- Sydney J. Harris

Henry S. Haskins

(top)

Many a man gets weary of clamping down on his rough impulses, which if given occasional release would encourage the living of life with salt in it, in place of dust.

- Henry S. Haskins

William Hazlitt

(top)

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

- William Hazlitt

Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

(top)

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

- Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes

Elbert Hubbard

(top)

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

- Elbert Hubbard

Henry James

(top)

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

- Henry James

William James

(top)

To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.

- William James

Jerome K. Jerome

(top)

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.

- Jerome K. Jerome

Samuel Johnson

(top)

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

- Samuel Johnson

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

- Samuel Johnson

Henry J. Kaiser

(top)

Trouble is only opportunity in work clothes.

- Henry J. Kaiser

John F. Kennedy

(top)

When written in Chinese the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

- John F. Kennedy

E. Knight

(top)

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. Waste not the smallest time in imbecile infirmity, for well thou knowest that seconds form eternity.

- E. Knight

Abraham Lincoln

(top)

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

- Abraham Lincoln

Jack London

(top)

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

- Jack London

George Macdonald

(top)

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

- George Macdonald

Maurice Maeterlinck

(top)

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

- Maurice Maeterlinck

Mignon McLaughlin

(top)

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.

- Mignon McLaughlin

Fields can lie fallow, but we can't; we have less time.

- Mignon McLaughlin

Grasp your opportunities, no matter how poor your health; nothing is worse for your health than boredom.

- Mignon McLaughlin

Hugh Miller

(top)

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

- Hugh Miller

Arthur Miller

(top)

The word "now" is like a bomb through the window, and it ticks.

- Arthur Miller

John Henry Cardinal Newman

(top)

Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

- John Henry Cardinal Newman

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

(top)

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Richard M. Nixon

(top)

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.

- Richard M. Nixon

Marcel Proust

(top)

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

- Marcel Proust

Chinese Proverb

(top)

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.

- Chinese Proverb

Indian Proverb

(top)

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.

- Indian Proverb

Scottish Proverb

(top)

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.

- Scottish Proverb

Spanish Proverb

(top)

No man is quick enough to enjoy life to the full.

- Spanish Proverb

Japanese Proverb

(top)

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

- Japanese Proverb

David Rockefeller

(top)

One cannot expect to coast along and rise automatically to the top, no matter what friends you may have in the company. There may have been a time when, in large corporations, a person could rise simply because he had a stock interest or because he had friends in top management. That's not true today. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.

- David Rockefeller

Helen Rowland

(top)

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

- Helen Rowland

George Santayana

(top)

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

- George Santayana

Sir Walter Scott

(top)

To always be intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.

- Sir Walter Scott

Vin Scully

(top)

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game.

- Vin Scully

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

(top)

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Dr. Seuss

(top)

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite. Or waiting around for Friday night or waiting perhaps for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil or a better break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants or a wig with curls or another chance. Everyone is just waiting.

- Dr. Seuss

William Shakespeare

(top)

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

- William Shakespeare

George Bernard Shaw

(top)

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

- George Bernard Shaw

Sydney Smith

(top)

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

- Sydney Smith

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(top)

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

Jonathan Swift

(top)

May you live all the days of your life.

- Jonathan Swift

Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.

- Jonathan Swift

Publilius Syrus

(top)

While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity.

- Publilius Syrus

Rabindranath Tagore

(top)

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Henry David Thoreau

(top)

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.