Your outlook shapes your reality more than your circumstances do — at least according to these thinkers. This collection covers mindset, perspective, and the daily choice between seeing the glass as half full, half empty, or just a glass that needs washing.
“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”
“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”
“Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”
“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”
“We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.”
“If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good.”
“Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.”
“The best way to inspire people to superior performance is to convince them by everything you do and by your everyday attitude that you are wholeheartedly supporting them.”
“In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.”
“I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.”
“I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.”
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
“A positive attitude is not going to save you. What it's going to do is, everyday, between now and the day you die, whether that's a short time from now or a long time from now, that every day, you're going to actually live.”
“Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise.”
“Funny is an attitude.”
“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker if sad, it must not scream or curse.”