A Quote by Benjamin Franklin

While the path to wealth is clearly marked, few are willing to adapt themselves to the modest discipline that the journey requires. Instead, most choose the shinier track of debt-driven consumption, which they find further along is covered in vines and thorns.

Benjamin Franklin

Quote Topics

Adapt Along Choose Clearly Consumption Covered Debt Discipline Driven Few Find Further Instead Journey Marked Modest Most Path Requires Themselves Thorns Track Vines Wealth Which While Willing

Quote Author

Benjamin Franklin
American - Politician
January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of a complaint.

Henri Nouwen

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Marriner Stoddard Eccles

Acting requires a lot of discipline to go with the obsession. It's a path of knowledge, and of self-knowledge. Sometimes you get lost on the path. And then you find yourself again.

Toni Servillo

In every remodelling of the present, the existing condition of things must be supplanted by a new one. Now every variety of circumstances in which men find themselves, every object which surrounds them, communicates a definite form and impress to their internal nature. This form is not such that it can change and adapt itself to any other a man may choose to receive; and the end is foiled, while the power is destroyed, when we attempt to impose upon that which is already stamped in the soul a form which disagrees with it.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

While many in the social enterprise space often qualify themselves as 'non-profit,' these organizations should instead treat themselves as 'for-purpose.' These organizations should focus on their mission to create social good, while still treating themselves with the same commitment to rigor and discipline as the best for-profits.

Adam Braun

I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

Lord Byron

You have it in your power to make your days on Earth a path of flowers, instead of a path of thorns.

Sathya Sai Baba

Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.

Hermann Hesse

Entrance into the Old Ways begins with the pricking of a finger with a rose thorn, which produces a drop of blood. This opens the way into the Thorned Path, a system, which uses five rose thorns to symbolize the five arts of Witchcraft that one should master. These arts are Herbalist, Fortune-Teller, Spirit Medium, Mystic, and Magician. We call mastering these aspects 'the gathered thorns' --thus the Thorned Path.

Raven Grimassi

While restoring a sense of fiscal discipline to Congress is a top priority, infrastructure spending is an important and necessary task of government. Our nation's long-term debt requires us to prioritize and economize with every tax dollar.

Cynthia Lummis

Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work.

Felix Rohatyn

The Chinese government clearly does pay attention to public opinion expressed on the Internet - the extent to which they choose to adapt their practices based on it, or ignore it, seems to vary.

Rebecca MacKinnon

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

Marquis de Sade

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

Barry Commoner

While the aesthetics of consumption (photographic or otherwise) requires a heroicized myth of the artist, the exemplary practice of the player-off codes requires only an operator, a producer, a scriptor, or a pasticheur.