Quotes 'n' Such

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes a necessity.

A vision, without the ability to execute it, is probably a hallucination.

It's not how many times you get knocked down. It's how many times you get back up.

Once you experience being in control of your financial future, it really is addictive.

I want to be financially independent. I want to work (if I decide to work) on what I enjoy the most, not on what pays me the most.

Paying for yesterday is perhaps the most important investment you can make in your future. Getting rid of those debts will buy you breathing room. It will buy a future of freedom. And it will bring your dreams — the things you really, really want — into reach.

Your bills tell your past, but they also tell your future. Every debt, every monthly payment, every dollar you owe is a claim against your future. Debt affects what you can — and cannot — do about your future. And when you pay off the credit cards and IOUs, you open up new worlds of financial possibilities for yourself. You have more to spend, more to save, and a whole lot less to worry about.

Your worth as a person does not come from what you are paid. It comes from who you are and what you give.

Always make sure to fasten your chin strap right after the battle. The battle might not be over.

There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.

I will just create, and if it works, it works, and if it doesn't, I'll create something else. I don't have any limitations on what I think I could do or be.

Wealth is a great thing to have and a great thing to share.

My idea of being rich — or at least of feeling rich — is to have no debts, mortgage, or overdraft and to be able to pay all bills by return post. This may seem a fairly modest ambition, but if everyone in the West were in this position our societies would indeed merit the term "affluent," and the world would be a much happier place.

Don't buy things; buy freedom.

The Inquiring Mind is never satisfied with the way things are. It is always seeking ways to make things better. It assumes that everything and anything can be improved.

Even if you cannot do great things, you can do small things with great love.

A study by Dun & Bradstreet showed that the credit-card user spends 12 to 18 percent more when using credit instead of cash. It hurts when you spend cash, and therefore you spend less. The big question is, what do millionaires do? They don't get rich with free hats, brownie points, air miles, and the use of someone else's money. What do broke people do? They use credit cards.

Debt is so ingrained into our culture that most Americans can't even envision a car without a payment ... a house without a mortgage ... a student without a loan ... and credit without a card. We've been sold debt with such repetition and with such fervor that most folks can't conceive of what it would be like to have NO payments.

I don't want to walk across hot coals because it is fun. But if I can be shown how a short, painful walk will do away with a lifetime of worry, frustration, stress, and the fear that being constantly broke brings me, then bring on the hot coals.

Winning at money is 80 percent behavior and 20 percent head knowledge. Most of us know what to do but we just don't do it.

Money is not just pieces of paper or electronic blips with prices attached. It is far more:   our fondest hopes, our most fervent dreams, our worst nightmares, all balled up into an explosively emotional package.

A debt is a bet, an implicit wager that you'll have money later to pay for all the crap you're buying now that you can't afford.

It is challenging to face the "dark side" of how you handle money — or the doubts, fears, worries, and thwarted hopes that may appear. Sometimes it's hard to see the hidden treasure, but when we tell the truth about what we see, even when we don't want to see it, we're given even more strength.

The consumerism of the postwar era has not been without its effects on the way we use our time. As people became accustomed to the material rewards of prosperity, desires for leisure time were eroded. They increasingly looked to consumption to give satisfaction, even meaning, to their lives. In both the workplace and the home, progress has repeatedly translated into more goods and services, rather than more free time. Employers channel productivity increases into additional income; housewives are led to use their labor-saving appliances to produce more goods and services. Consumerism traps us as we become habituated to the good life, emulate our neighbors, or just get caught up in the social pressures created by everyone else's choices. Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome — a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.

Money is one form of power. But what is more powerful is financial education. Money comes and goes, but if you have the education about how money works, you gain power over it and can begin building wealth. The reason positive thinking alone does not work is because most people went to school and never learned how money works, so they spend their lives working for money.

The rich buy assets. The poor only have expenses. The middle class buys liabilities they think are assets. The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

We build our working lives on this myth of more. Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on. We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field. Eventually, we hope, we will have more possessions, more prestige, and more respect from our community. We become habituated to expecting ever more of ourselves and ever more from the world, but rather than satisfaction, our experience is that the more we have, the more we want — and the less content we are with the status quo.

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, "enough" is like the horizon — always receding. You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop.

One reason why newcomers — and not-so-newcomers — insist on entering the stock market here (January, 2003) is that yields are so poor in other instruments. What they haven't yet grasped is that what you don't lose is as important as what you make. In other words, if you enter the market and begin to lose money, you have a negative yield. Then you get on the making-it-back treadmill.

The junk-bond-financed frenzy of corporate mergers and acquisitions, which defined the 1980s, had spilled over into the rampant consumerism of American campus life. Indeed, banks were eager to make high-interest loans to students, and credit cards became their financial vehicle of choice. Ultimately, credit cards became the personal junk bonds of Generation X.

It is doubtful that the average American could have described the precise meaning of the term "American standard of living," but nearly everyone agreed that it was attainable, highly desirable, and far superior to that of any other nation. Its nature varied according to social class and regional differences, but no matter where a family stood socially and financially, it was certain to have aspirations set beyond that stance. This was the great paradox posed by the material prosperity of the twentieth century: prosperity was conspicuously present, but it was always just out of reach, for nearly every family defined its standard of living in terms of an income that it hoped to achieve rather than the reality of the paycheck.

In 1983 I was asked to interview sixty millionaires from Oklahoma. What I learned from them was simple, yet the message had a lasting impact on me: You cannot enjoy life if you are addicted to consumption and the use of credit. These Oklahoma millionaires were just the opposite, as demonstrated by one focus group of ten. All were seasoned business owners, executives, or professionals. All were first-generation wealthy. Some were credit-dependent earlier in their careers, but they eventually saw the light. They went cold turkey, breaking the cycle of borrowing to consume, earning to consume, and borrowing more and more money. Others never became addicted to credit, or to the need to display their success.

Most people have it all wrong about wealth in America. Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend. How do you become wealthy? Here, too, most people have it wrong. It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes. Wealth is more often a result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.

You must trust yourself more than you trust anyone else with your money.

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.

Your financial life is like a garden. If you tend a garden carefully, nourishing the flowers, pruning, and weeding, it's going to be a lot more beautiful than if you just water it halfheartedly now and then.

It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists, not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently applied. Men are paid, not merely for what they know, but more particularly for what they do with that which they know.

Discipline comes through self-control. This means that one must control all negative qualities. Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself. Self-mastery is the hardest job you will ever tackle. If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self. By stepping in front of a mirror, you may see at one and the same time both your best friend and your greatest enemy.

Failure cannot cope with persistence.

The spendthrift cannot succeed, mainly because he stands eternally in fear of poverty. Form the habit of systematic saving by putting aside a definite percentage of your income. Money in the bank gives one a very safe foundation of courage when bargaining for the sale of personal services. Without money, one must take what one is offered, and be glad to get it.

If you are thinking thoughts of defeat, I urge you to rid yourself of such thoughts, for as you think defeat you tend to get it. Adopt the "I don't believe in defeat" attitude.

Once you learn from your failures and mistakes, they should be discarded like spoiled food. To judge yourself only in light of your failures and mistakes is to assume more of the same.

So the first thing to do about an obstacle is simply to stand up to it and not complain about it or whine under it but forthrightly attack it. Don't go crawling through life on your hands and knees half-defeated. Stand up to your obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven't half the strength you think they have.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Altogether too many people are defeated by the everyday problems of life. They go struggling, perhaps even whining, through their days with a sense of dull resentment at what they consider the "bad breaks" life has given them. In a sense there may be such a thing as "the breaks" in this life, but there is also a spirit and method by which we can control and even determine those breaks. It is a pity that people should let themselves be defeated by the problems, cares, and difficulties of human existence, and it is also quite unnecessary.

Attitudes are more important than facts.

Living in debt is nerve-wracking, insomnia-producing, and family-wrecking. Just don't do it. There is nothing you can buy that feels as good as being in debt feels bad.