It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all…

Edward de Bono

Edward de Bono is regarded by many to be the leading authority in the world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. He has written 62 books with translations into 37 languages and has been invited to lecture in 54 countries. He is the originator of lateral thinking which treats creativity as the behaviour of information in a self-organising information system – such as the neural networks in the brain. From such a consideration arise the deliberate and formal tools of lateral thinking, parallel thinking etc.

http://www.edwdebono.com/

 

Life’s pretty tough… you’re lucky if you live through it…

Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children’s songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is “This Land Is Your Land”. Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence.

Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the “Dust Bowl Troubadour”. Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was allegedly not a member of any.

Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. He is the grandfather of musician Sarah Lee Guthrie.[4] Guthrie died from complications of Huntington’s disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.

Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woody_Guthrie

 

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit…

Aristotle

 

The greatest obstacle to most people isn’t skill, it’s attitude…

Harley Brown

Those who avoid the tough choices of life live a life they never chose…

Robert Brault

The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective…

Allen H. Neuharth

Allen Harold “Al” Neuharth (born March 22, 1924, Eureka, South Dakota) is an American businessman, author, and columnist. He is the founder of USA Today, The Freedom Forum, and its Newseum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Neuharth

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster’s humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: “Only connect”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Forster

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought. …

Matsuo Basho

Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉?, 1644 – November 28, 1694), born Matsuo Kinsaku (松尾 金作?), then Matsuo Chūemon Munafusa (松尾 忠右衛門 宗房?), was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime, Bashō was recognized for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form; today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as a master of brief and clear haiku. His poetry is internationally renowned, and within Japan many of his poems are reproduced on monuments and traditional sites.

Bashō was introduced to poetry at a young age, and after integrating himself into the intellectual scene of Edo he quickly became well-known throughout Japan. He made a living as a teacher, but renounced the social, urban life of the literary circles and was inclined to wander throughout the country, heading west, east, and far into the northern wilderness to gain inspiration for his writing. His poems were influenced by his firsthand experience of the world around him, often encapsulating the feeling of a scene in a few simple elements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D

Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final…

Roger W. Babson

Roger Ward Babson (July 6, 1875 – March 5, 1967), remembered today largely for founding Babson College in Massachusetts, was an entrepreneur and business theorist in the first half of the 20th century. He also founded Webber College, now Webber International University, in Babson Park, Florida, and the defunct Utopia College, in Eureka, Kansas.

He was born to Nathaniel Babson and his wife Ellen Stearns as part of the tenth generation of Babsons to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Roger attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for investment firms before founding, in 1904, Babson’s Statistical Organization, which analyzed stocks and business reports. It continues today as Babson-United, Inc..

On March 29, 1900, Babson married his first wife, Grace Margaret Knight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Babson

Spontaneity needn’t suffer from preplanning…

James McFarlane

James Walter McFarlane (12 December 1920, Sunderland – 9 August 1999, Stody, Norfolk) was a scholar of European literature, author of The Oxford Ibsen, and founding Dean of the School of European Studies at University of East Anglia which specialised in Scandinavian studies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McFarlane