John Wooden’s favorite maxims
by Joe · 57 things on Twos
- Happiness begins where selfishness ends.
- Earn the right to be proud and confident.
- The best way to improve the team is to improve ourselves.
- Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details.
- Discipline yourself and others won’t need to.
- Ability may get you to the top but character will keep you there.
- I will get ready and then, perhaps, my chance will come.
- If I am through learning, I am through.
- If you do not have the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over.
- The smallest good deed is better than the best intention.
- The man who is afraid to risk failure seldom will have to face success.
- Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.
- Time spent getting even would be better spent trying to get ahead.
- It is what you learn after you know it all that counts.
- Consider the rights of others before your own feelings and the feelings of others before your own rights.
- There is nothing stronger than gentleness.
- You discipline those under your supervision to correct, to help, to improve; not to punish.
- Goals achieved with little effort are seldom worthwhile or lasting.
- Make sure the team knows they are working with you not for you.
- Be most interested in finding the best way not in having your own way.
- What is right is more important than who is right.
- You handle things, you work with people.
- As long as you try to your best you are never a failure; that is unless you blame others.
- Tell the truth, that way you don’t have to remember a story.
- Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life.
- If I were ever prosecuted for my religion I truly hope there would be enough evidence to convict me.
- Although there is no progress without change, not all change is progress.
- If we’d magnified blessings as much as we magnified disappointments we would all be much happier.
- The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
- The worst thing that you can do for another person is the things they can and should do for themselves. Abraham Lincoln
- It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely help another without also helping himself. Ralph Waldo Emmerson.
- Do not permit what you cannot do to interfere with what you can do.
- Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Character is what your really are; reputation is merely what you are perceived to be.
- Love is the greatest of all words in our language.
- Much can be accomplished by teamwork when no one is concerned who gets credit.
- Never make excuses; your friends don’t need them and your foes won’t believe them.
- We don’t have to be disagreeable just because we may disagree.
- Be slow to criticize and quick to commend.
- Be more concerned with what you can do for others than what others can do for you; you’ll be surprised at the results.
- The more concerned we become over the things we can’t control the less we will do with the things we can control.
- Don’t permit fear of failure to prevent effort; we are all imperfect and will fail on occasion but fear of failure is the greatest failure of all.
- Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.
- The time to make friends is before you need them.
- We are many but are we much?
- Never be thrown off stride in how you behave or what you believe in because of outside events.
- Nothing can give you greater joy than doing something for another.
- Material things are not gifts but apologies for gifts, the only true gift is a portion of thyself. Ralf Waldo Emerson.
- We cannot live a perfect day without doing something for another without the thought of something in return.
- Do not mistake activity for achievement.
- You can do more good by being good than any other way.
- Forget favours given, remember those received.
- Make each day your masterpiece.
- Make friendship of fine art.
- Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.
- Treat all people with dignity and respect.
- Acquire peace of mind by making the effort to become the best of which you are capable.
- Be fast but do not hurry.