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Engaging Quotations

Let’s share favorite quotations that are somehow relevant to business. I frequently include them in letters, e-mails, proposals, and book reviews. They may not always provide a head-snapping revelation but do add some “seasoning” to the prose.

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Strategic Use of Engaging Quotations 6 Replies

Started by Robert Morris. Last reply by Jon Hoel Jun 30, 2008.

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Comment by Peter A Hunter on September 7, 2011 at 7:22am

Robert.

Good idea, I have been using engagement quotes every week for the last eight years in my newsletters. There must be a couple of hundred on the BtM website. This from May 2005:

“Turned on” people figure out how to beat the competition,

“Turned off” people only complain about being beaten by the competition.

 Ben Simonton – Author Of Leading People To Be Highly Motivated And Committed.

Feel free to dip in.

Peter A Hunter

www.breakingthemould.co.uk

Comment by Robert Morris on September 7, 2011 at 5:57am

Excellent, Peter!

Thank you.

Let's both try to add a new one each week and hope that others will, also.

 

Comment by Peter A Hunter on September 7, 2011 at 2:49am

“Denied The Opportunity To Use Their Talent, Imagination And Creativity For The Benefit Of The System They Will Be Equally Ingenious Working Against It.”

John J Oliver and Clive Memmot – Growing Your Own Heroes.

 

Peter A Hunter

www.breakingthemould.co.uk

Comment by Robert Morris on April 25, 2011 at 9:13pm

Thank you, Kenda. Your comments are deeply appreciated.

 

I plan to add some new ones soon.

 

I hope you will do so, also.

 

Meanwhile, best wishes and warmest regards.

Comment by Kenda Marks on April 25, 2011 at 8:01pm

I love "A Scot's Farewell".

 

One of my favorite quotes is, "“One's mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Comment by Robert Morris on September 20, 2010 at 2:34pm
As you already know, I highly recommend The Yale Book of Quotations, brilliantly edited by Fred R. Shapiro and published by Yale University Press. FYI, none of those that follow are included in it.

Here are two sets of "snappy" quotations that I have posted at my EEN blog.

I hope you find many uses for them such as in emails, proposals, and during formal presentations.

1. “There are no accidents in the universe.” (Source?)

2. “I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.” Mark Twain

3. “Thinking has become a disease. It is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. That is the disease. You believe that you are your mind.” Eckhart Tolle

4. "Sow a thought, and you reap an act. Sow an act, and you reap a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” Charles Reade

5. “To understand everything, let go of what you know.” Old Indian saying

6. “Happiness is when what we think, what we say, and what we do are in harmony.” Mohandas Gandhi

7. “All we achieve and all that we fail to achieve is the direct result of our own thoughts. We are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.” James Allen

8. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” Henry David Thoreau

9. “It’s not the answers that show us the way, but the questions.” Tennessee H. Harris

10. “Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” Goethe

11. “God is a comedian performing before an audience that is afraid to laugh.” Voltaire

12. “Some mornings it doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.” Emo Phillips

13. “Money cannot buy you happiness but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.” David Lee Roth

14. “We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles, but no personality.” Albert Einstein

15. “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head…It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a while.” A.A. Milne

16. “A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth.” Henrik Ibsen

17. Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

18. “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Marcus Aurelius

19. “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” Mother Teresa

20. “I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.” Lily Tomlin
Comment by Robert Morris on August 25, 2010 at 6:33pm
One of my favorite reference sources is the Yale Book of Quotations. Credit Fred R. Shapiro with a brilliant response to heaven knows how many challenges. Here are several quotations that are not as yet included in the YBQ. Shapiro will gratefully welcome corrections of information provided in this volume as well as suggestions of new quotations for future editions. Submit them to fred.shapiro@yale.edu or www.quotationdictionary.com.

Meanwhile:

“The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Steven Wright

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.” Steven Wright

“Don’t worry about people stealing your idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard Aiken

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Woody Allen

"I invent nothing. I rediscover." Rodin

"Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it. " Søren Kierkegaard

And the last word, for now:


A SCOT’S FAREWELL


When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me,
I want no tears in a gloom filled room;
Why cry for a soul set free?

Miss me a little but not for long
And not for your head bowed low;
Remember the love we once shared.
Miss me .... but let me go.

For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone;
It's all part of the master plan,
A step on the road to home.

When you are lonely and sick of heart,
Go to the the friend we know
And bury your sorrows in doing good deeds.

Miss me....but let me go.
Comment by Robert Morris on July 19, 2010 at 1:56pm
Here are some quotations that caught my eye during recent reading:

“Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is.”
Gordon Clegg (1969)

A meeting is a refuge from “the dreariness of labor and the loneliness of thought.”
Bernard Baruch (1970)

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” Marshall McLuhan (1967)

“Truth will sooner come out of error than from confusion.” Sir Francis Bacon (1620)

“While some may see [our designers] as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs (1997)

“Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first, from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.”
Edward Gibbon (1789)
Comment by Robert Morris on July 17, 2010 at 8:00am
Welcome, Kevin, and "Thank you!" to all who have contributed quotations thus far.

Here are five that recently caught my eye:

“There is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."
Benjamin Franklin

"The men American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; 
the men they detest most violently are those who try and tell them the truth."
 H. L. Mencken

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
 Albert Einstein

"We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality." 
Ayn Rand

"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." 
Frederick Douglass.
Comment by Kevin Savage on July 16, 2010 at 4:23pm
This was very timely in that I was looking to spice up a presentation to the executive with some lively quotes. I will endeavour to contribute when I come accross "Zingers" myself
 

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