A Quote for Every Day

Contents

Introduction

January 1

January 2

January 3

January 4

January 5

January 6

January 7

January 8

January 9

January 10

January 11

January 12

January 13

January 14

January 15

January 17

January 18

January 19

January 20

January 21

January 22

January 23

January 24

January 25

January 26

January 27

January 28

January 29

January 30

January 31

February 1

February 2

February 3

February 4

February 5

February 6

February 7

February 8

February 9

February 10

February 11

February 12

February 13

February 14

February 15

February 16

February 17

February 18

February 19

February 20

February 21

February 22

February 23

February 24

February 25

February 26

February 27

February 28

February 29

March 1

March 2

March 3

March 4

March 5

March 6

March 7

March 8

March 9

March 10

March 11

March 12

March 13

March 14

March 15

March 16

March 17

March 18

March 19

March 20

March 21

March 22

March 23

March 24

March 25

March 26

March 27

March 28

March 29

March 30

March 31

April 1

April 2

April 3

April 4

April 5

April 6

April 7

April 8

April 9

April 10

April 11

April 12

April 13

April 14

April 15

April 16

April 17

April 18

April 19

April 20

April 21

April 22

April 23

April 24

April 25

April 26

April 27

April 28

April 29

April 30

May 1

May 2

May 3

May 4

May 5

May 6

May 7

May 8

May 9

May 10

May 11

May 12

May 13

May 14

May 15

May 16

May 17

May 18

May 19

May 20

May 21

May 22

May 23

May 24

May 25

May 26

May 27

May 28

May 29

May 30

May 31

June 1

June 2

June 3

June 4

June 5

June 6

June 7

June 8

June 9

June 10

June 11

June 12

June 13

June 14

June 15

June 16

June 17

June 18

June 19

June 20

June 21

June 22

June 23

June 24

June 25

June 26

June 27

June 28

June 29

June 30

July 1

July 2

July 3

July 4

July 5

July 6

July 7

July 8

July 9

July 10

July 11

July 12

July 13

July 14

July 15

July 16

July 17

July 18

July 19

July 20

July 21

July 22

July 23

July 24

July 25

July 26

July 27

July 28

July 29

July 30

July 31

August 1

August 2

August 3

August 4

August 5

August 6

August 7

August 8

August 9

August 10

August 11

August 12

August 13

August 14

August 15

August 16

August 17

August 18

August 19

August 20

August 21

August 22

August 23

August 24

August 25

August 26

August 27

August 28

August 29

August 30

August 31

September 1

September 2

September 3

September 4

September 5

September 6

September 7

September 8

September 9

September 10

September 11

September 12

September 13

September 14

September 15

September 16

September 17

September 18

September 19

September 20

September 21

September 22

September 23

September 24

September 25

September 26

September 27

September 28

September 29

September 30

October 1

October 2

October 3

October 4

October 5

October 6

October 7

October 8

October 9

October 10

October 11

October 12

October 13

October 14

October 15

October 16

October 17

October 18

October 19

October 20

October 21

October 22

October 23

October 24

October 25

October 26

October 27

October 28

October 29

October 30

October 31

November 1

November 2

November 3

November 4

November 5

November 6

November 7

November 8

November 9

November 10

November 11

November 12

November 13

November 14

November 15

November 16

November 17

November 18

November 19

November 20

November 21

November 22

November 23

November 24

November 25

November 26

November 27

November 28

November 29

November 30

December 1

December 2

December 3

December 4

December 5

December 6

December 7

December 8

December 9

December 10

December 11

December 12

December 13

December 14

December 15

December 16

December 17

December 18

December 19

December 20

December 21

December 22

December 23

December 24

December 25

December 26

December 27

December 28

December 29

December 30

December 31

Author Note

LaPorta Enterprises

Introduction

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes are memorable. You hear someone say something profound and you look for paper to write it down. You want to type it and put it up in your office. You want to share it with others so you post it on your Facebook page or tweet it for all to see. For many, quotes provide inspiration and motivation. They become doctrines and mission statements and guiding principles. For me, quotes have been all that and so much more.

Since the beginning of time, great leaders have spoken great words. Historians have had the forethought to write down and attribute those quotes to their creator so that we can have some kind of window to the orator. Somewhere along the line, someone had the idea to start recording quotes from people that were not leaders. Actors, musicians, philosophers, artists and numerous others have spoken words that invoke thought. They may not be traditionally motivational in nature, but they stir up enough emotions to evoke conversation and controversy. You may not want or be able to put them up on your wall, but you will be thinking about them all day long.

The book that follows is not your typical book of quotes. Every day of the year, including an extra for leap year, is in chronological order. Each quote has been carefully chosen for that specific day of the year. As you read along or as an after thought, you can play detective and find out why that quote is special to that day. If the background does not appeal to you, simply read ahead and enjoy the quotes.

Attached to each and every quote are thought provoking messages. Some are straight out of some of my seminars while others venture into uncharted water. We will start off slow and build on your thoughts and insights. As the weeks pass by, you will encounter such topics as courage, leadership, and goal attainment. Love, marriage, and suffering quotes will bring out strong emotions towards others. Nature, arbor, and quotes from the animal world will have you thirsting for the great outdoors. While some quotes may convey multiple topics; each is taken on a journey of their own.

In the pages that follow, you will see some of the greatest names in history. Jefferson, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Patton are joined by Napoleon, Jackson, and Mandela. Joel, Mangione, and Jagger are kept entertained by Berlioz, Presley, and The Beatles. You will venture out into the wings with Houdini, Lenin, and Imus while being grounded by Buddha, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. While the writings of motivational speakers such as myself are clearly represented, you will be introduced to an amazing array of other outspoken visionaries.

Once again, come along for a great adventure. We will spend a year together seeking enlightenment, understanding, and humor. In the end, you will have a collection of quotes to refer to for years to come. As always, I hope you enjoy the ride.

Peter A. LaPorta

January 1

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind...let it be something good. 

Author Unknown 

Every day of your life is a gift. When you wake up and the sun rises, the world is at your fingertips. You can get on a plane and fly to a distant land. You can put one foot in front of the other and start an incredible journey. Whatever your choice, make sure you choose. Do not let the hours pass with no purpose, no direction. To waste the gift of time is to waste away part of your life. Embrace it and the world is at your fingertips.

January 2

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

Isaac Asimov

Don’t talk to strangers. Avoid the poor and down trod. Stay away from depressed economic areas. So often, we turn the cheek on those that need us most because it makes us uncomfortable. We go out of our way not to see the homeless. We only visit hospitals and nursing homes when we are forced to accompany family members. But what about the patients without any family? What about the homeless mothers seeking food and shelter for their children? On this day, in this new year, seek out ways to help your fellow man. Do not let the opinions of those around you stop you from seeking out those in need. It may be your simple act of kindness that will impact their lives forever.

January 3

Laughter is the shortest distance between two people

Victor Borge

They say that laughter is the best medicine. But what is the ailment? The answer to that question is life. There is no challenge or problem in life that won’t seem a little brighter if you can only find a way to laugh about it. If you can share that laughter with someone else, then you have brightened up another life, if only for a moment. So live well, laugh often, and share your broad smile with all you come into contact with.

January 4

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.

Author Unknown

You had a cigarette. You fell off your diet. Four days into your New Year’s resolutions and you have stumbled already. It’s ok. You are human. In the almighty race of life, it is natural to run into obstacles. If you accept these pot holes in your journey as a possibility, they become much easier to overcome. You are not assuring failure but making provisions if it does occur. So dust off your pants and stand up again. Put one foot in front of the other and you will be on your journey to success in no time.

January 5

If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.

John Wooden

Get out of bed. Get off the couch. Pick up a phone. Turn on the computer. Sharpen your pencil and grab a pad. Do something! So many of us are afraid of failure that we don’t try to do anything. Why should I enter the race if I know I can’t win? Why should I start a relationship just to open myself to failure? The answer is simple. You are guaranteed to miss 100% of the shots you do not take. So take the shot! Call someone. Ask for that raise or promotion. Take up a new hobby. You’ll never know what you can achieve if you do not try.

January 6

"If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Jealousy always brings out the worst in people. If you succeed at your endeavors, someone will always be there to minimize your success. They may claim you took short cuts or stepped on toes. There will be others that will try to put their accomplishments in greater light than yours. If your success acquires fame and notoriety, there will be plenty that ride your coat tails in false representation. At the end of the day, stay true to yourself. If you have succeeded, know that is from your efforts that you have attained your goals. Take pride in your efforts but stay humble to all.

January 7

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it

Harry S. Truman

The greatest leader I can ever hope to be is a father to my children. As every parent aspires towards success, the best way to accomplish this is simply through encouragement and guidance. Every child has their individual passions. It may be music, it may be art, or it may be the latest trend or vampire movie. Support their passions and you will embrace the things that they care about the most. You may not care for the music they are listening to or the way they want to wear their hair, but if you support them and guide them through the fog, they will make sound decisions and succeed in their own endeavors. What more can a parent hope for?

January 8

Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards make every day and every decade worth looking forward to.

Greg Anderson

We settle into our lives. We compromise our dreams and our aspirations. Instead of dreaming of riches, we settle for getting by on our paycheck. We get comfortable in our apartment homes and give up our dreams of having a house in the country with a picket fence. Instead of finding fame on Broadway we settle for karaoke at the local bar on a Saturday night. The perfect soul mate slips by after a hundred or so dates ending in failure. But like the saying goes, you have to kiss a lot of toads before you find your prince. You have to keep striving for excellence and not settle for the first toad you kiss. Higher goals lead to a higher quality of life. You may not reach those goals today, or even next week. But just imagine how much you will enjoy the journey!

January 9

And I want you to know that I have no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the people elected me to do for the people of the United States

Richard M. Nixon

Sometimes, even if you have the best intentions in mind, things go askew. Life intersects and sends you into a spiral that you had not planned on or puts you into an unforeseen situation. You can rant or rave or you can just adjust. There are going to be times in life where you have to learn to dance on a shifting carpet. The most important things to keep in mind are to keep calm, use your best judgment, and stay true to your beliefs. In the end, you and only you have to live with your actions. So choose wisely.

January 10

If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it

John D. Rockefeller

How many times from how many people have you heard the terms, I am going to be rich or I am going to be famous? It’s not a guarantee, but most of those people you heard that from have never achieved either. I never realized this until I became a published author. The number of people that I have run into that have told me that they want to write a book so they can become famous are too numerous to count. The problem with all of these people is that they seek a magical formula. There are no get rich pills or we would all take them. We cannot all be famous or the term itself would not have any meaning. Today, begin your journey with a higher goal in mind. Complete a book. Record a song. Finish a race. If you get rich or famous from it, so be it. If you don’t, at least you will have the sense of accomplishment at hand.

January 11

Dig the well before you are thirsty

Chinese Proverb

You are driving down a dark winding road in a rainstorm. It is a chilling fall rain that soaks through to the bone. You round a corner and hit a patch of leaves that unfortunately have covered a pile of glass. Within moments, your tire blows out and you find yourself stranded on the road. You reach for your cell phone and realize that the battery is dead. Should have charged it before you left the office. You reach in the glove compartment and pull out the flashlight. When you hit the switch, the light does not come on. Forgot to change the batteries. Before heading out in the rain, you reach for the umbrella and realize it is broken from the last windy storm. Should have replaced it. You get out in the rain, open your trunk and realize your jack is missing because you let a neighbor borrow it and it was never returned. What will you do now? Remember that Boy Scout motto from when you were a kid? Be prepared. Sometimes you can’t dig a well for water if you don’t have a shovel!

January 12

The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and to influence their actions

John Hancock

I will be the first to admit (and those that know me will agree) that I don’t always have this ability at hand. As an overachiever, I hold most people to a high standard of performance in business. I expect customer service to be held at the highest regard and will accept no compromise. Because of this, I seem to always ruffle a few feathers. So today I will ask of myself what I ask of you. Seek out others in business and try to get along. Try to be more understanding of their demands and look at things from their point of view. In doing so, you may realize that you will have a greater influence upon them. It is often said that the softer approach is often the most powerful. Let’s try it together, shall we?

January 13

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself

Galileo Galilei

There is an old proverb that says that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats forever. I try to keep that in mind in leadership. In all of the minds that I have mentored over the years, I have sought not only to place knowledge at their fingertips, but to have them embrace their meaning. If you simply give someone a manual and tell them to follow the steps, they are lost when something goes wrong. Curve balls become dead ends which cannot be navigated around. The perfect example of this is in the eyes of a new cashier. They are taught to put in the correct amount of money that the guest gives them and the computer will tell them the correct change to give back. Unfortunately, sometimes the guest finds that extra penny or the quarter to make the amounts come out even. The cashier becomes lost because they have side-stepped the process. Perhaps it would have been better if their leader trained them to count back change instead of relying on the register to do it for them. Who knows, there might even be less mistakes!

January 14

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage

Albert Schweitzer

One of the greatest films in American cinema has to be It’s A Wonderful Life. In this touching tale, George Bailey gets a chance to see how many lives he has touched. He gets to see the effect his life has produced, not only on others but his whole town. Unfortunately, our lives are not a motion picture, even though it seems like it sometimes. We take it for granted that no one notices the job we do or the efforts we make with our children and loved ones. We fail to notice that opening the door for someone may make their day. We walk around with blinders on and fail to see the effect that a smile or kind word has on others. Today, take off the blinders. Look around and try to see the effect of your actions on others. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you see.

January 15

I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony…

Coca-Cola Jingle, 1971

Why can’t we just all get along? Can anyone answer that for me? I used to love the Coke commercial that had all the skiers coming down the mountain singing this song. It was such a powerful message to a world in turmoil. Over the years, many ski resorts have copied that same event on their own mountains. Maybe they do it to promote world peace or maybe it’s just a really fun thing to do. Whatever the reason, it brings us to a harmonious feeling that bridges continents and cultures. As a true believer that we can achieve peace in our day, it is important to overcome individual differences. We are all children of the planet earth and as such we can find common ground. Put aside your discord and find harmony. It sounds so much better than chaos.

January 16

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

In a common theme you will encounter throughout this book, you can’t win if you don’t play! If all of your dreams are small than small achievements are all that you will have. Live life large! Go for the gusto. Don’t settle for less. It is true that the higher you try to climb will bring you to a greater fall, but the view is so much better up there. I still consider some of my greatest failures to be some of my greatest endeavors. I am a better person for trying to achieve those things. I may not have come home with the blue ribbon or the brass ring, but I am so much more alive for having tried. As you set out for your morning run today, do not settle for the same three blocks. Try doubling the distance. You may be sore, you may not make it and have to walk home, but at least you can say you tried. That’s more than you can say about yesterday.

January 17

Remember that time is money

Benjamin Franklin

Every day when we go to work, we exchange eight, ten, or even more hours of our life for a certain dollar amount. In return, we take that money and spend it on bills, on food and shelter, and once in a while, pleasure. We save up our nickels and dimes and treat ourselves and our families on vacations, new toys, gadgets or a new pair of shoes. In that regard, every moment of our work day corresponds to a little piece of the pleasure we will spend our money on. As you labor through your work day, keep that little piece in mind. When your printer jams, when that customer is screaming at you, when all heck is breaking loose at work, try to remember that even at that lousy moment, you just bought yourself a little trip to the Bahamas. Hopefully, that will be the motivation you need to move on with your day.

January 18

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

Charles Evans Hughes

It is a common misconception that if you look alike and act alike, you must be the same. As a parent of four very different individuals I can tell you that this is very much not true. Sure, they all look the same. They are brother and sisters after all. Yet, they are all unique children with their own sets of needs, privileges and activities. This misconception is actually why many people do not join the military. They feel that if they dress alike in the same uniform, they will have no individuality. They will lose their freedom of expression and artistry. While it is true that whenever you join a certain group or organization you take on their own uniform, it also holds true that you remain an individual. In every army, there are different ranks of officers and different positions to maintain. There are riflemen and there are snipers. There are people that work in the kitchen as well as the battlefield. Doing so makes them no less of a soldier but all the more individualistic. Regardless of what uniform you put on in your daily life, remember that you are different in a thousand different ways and those differences are your keys to freedom.

January 19

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night

Edgar Allan Poe

In order to achieve many of my endeavors, it becomes necessary to burn the candle at all ends at times. Doing so allows me to be aware of all hours of the day. I am often asked whether I am a morning person, a day person, or a night person. People try to type cast me into one of those shells so they can seek some understanding of what I do on a daily basis. When we ask that question of others, do we not conjure up images of that person in different circumstances? For example, I am riddled with laughter at the thought of my two oldest children taking on jobs that would have them up at five in the morning. I believe the only time they have seen the sunrise was when we experienced it together at the Grand Canyon. Otherwise, they remain creatures of the night. They both endure the wee hours of the moon light in order to finish reading a book or to watch a movie in its entirety. They will never understand the smell of an early morning dew as many will not ever experience the calm and stillness of the middle of the night. Whichever category you fall into remember that there are twenty four hours in every day and someone is awake during every one of them. Open your eyes in a different light and