William James

1. The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.  No one is compos sui [master of himself] if he have it not.  An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.
2. Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
3. The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
4. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
5. Most people never run far enough on the first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
6. The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

Erich Fromm

1. To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
2. Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.

Peter Drucker

1. What gets measured gets managed.
2. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done.
3. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

John Maynard Keynes

1. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
2. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
3. The love of money as a possession…will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
4. Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.
5. Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.
6. Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal.
7. Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
8. Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.
9. If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.

Margaret Mead

1. What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
2. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Albert Ellis

1. There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.
2. The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
3. Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they’re alive and human.
4. By not caring too much about what people think, I’m able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.
5. I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.
6. Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining.
7. The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.

Ellen Langer

1. Virtually all of life’s ills boil down to mindlessness. If you can understand someone else’s perspective, then there’s no reason to be angry at them, envy them, steal from them.
2. Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow.
3. Anticrastinator: Why get things done later when they can be done now?
4. Rather than ask ‘How could that be?’ it makes just as much sense to ask ‘Why couldn’t it be so?’
5. Certainty is a cruel mindset. It hardens our minds against possibility.
6. What we have learned to look for in a situation determines mostly what we see.
7. There is always a step small enough from where we are to get us to where we want to be. If we take that small step, there’s always another we can take, and eventually a goal thought to be too far to reach becomes achievable.
8. No worry before its time.

Carol Dweck

1. This is hard. This is fun.  (summing up growth mindset thinking)
2. Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.
3. Important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies.
4. Just because some people can do something with little or no training, it doesn’t mean that others can’t do it (and sometimes do it even better) with training.
5. Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard. (demonstrating praise, the growth-mindset way)
6. A company that cannot self-correct cannot thrive.
7. Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. (paraphrasing Daniel Wile)
8. The whole point of marriage is to encourage your partner’s development and have them encourage yours.
9. Your failures and misfortunes don’t threaten other people. . .It’s your assets and your successes that are problems for people who derive their self-esteem from being superior.
10. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.
11. If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it. (quoting Marva Collins, amazing teacher)
12. Teaching is a wonderful way to learn.
13. You’re in charge of your mind. You can help it grow by using it in the right way.
14. Effort is one of those things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.
15. Vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes. What works is making a vivid, concrete plan. . .about when where, and how.
16. What did you learn today? What mistake did you make that taught you something? What did you try hard at today?
17. What can I learn from this [setback]? What will I do next time I’m in this situation? (on handling setbacks the growth mindset way)

Others

1. Correlation is not causation.
   ~in any typical statistics book
2. You don’t have to be interesting. You have to be interested. That’s how you have conversations.
   ~John Gottman
3. It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
   ~Alfred Adler
4. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
   ~Clayton Christensen
5. Human beings aren’t rational animals; we’re rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.
   ~Elliot Aronson
6. Temperament may constrain what can be, but it does not determine it.
   ~Jerome Kagan
7. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
   ~Viktor E. Frankl