1. “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” —Norman Vincent Peale

2. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” —Walt Disney

3. “Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.” —Pauline Kael

4. “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” —George Herbert

5. “Press forward. Do not stop, do not linger in your journey, but strive for the mark set before you.” —George Whitefield

6. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” —Eleanor Roosevelt

7. “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.” —W. Clement Stone

8. “Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.” —Sam Levenson

9. “There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.” —Michael Phelps

10. “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.” —Theodore Roosevelt

11. “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

12. “One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.” —Michael Korda

13. “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” —Simone de Beauvoir

14. "Nothing is more exciting than a bachelor"-Lesego finger

15. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” —Arthur Ashe

16. “Why should you continue going after your dreams? Because seeing the look on the faces of the people who said you couldn’t… will be priceless.” —Kevin Ngo

17. “Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” —Harriet Beecher Stow

Believing in yourself

1. Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

2. You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.

3. It always seems impossible until it’s done.

4. Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. – John Wooden

Cultivating a success mindset

5. Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. – Arthur Ashe

6. Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential. – John Maxwell

7. The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well. – John D. Rockefeller

8. Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them.

9. Strive for progress, not perfection.

10. I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. – Thomas Jefferson

11. Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. – Robert Collier

12. Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better. – Jim Rohn

13. I don’t regret the things I’ve done. I regret the things I didn’t do when I had the chance.

14. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who want to get things done and those who don’t want to make mistakes. – John Maxwell

Overcoming procrastination

15. The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

16. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

17. The expert in everything was once a beginner.

Hard work

18. There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. – Beverly Sills

19. Push yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.

20. Some people dream of accomplishing great things. Others stay awake and make it happen.

21. There is no substitute for hard work. – Thomas Edison

22. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little “extra.”

23. You don’t always get what you wish for; you get what you work for.

24. It’s not about how bad you want it. It’s about how hard you’re willing to work for it.

25. The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. – Vidal Sassoon

26. There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. – Zig Ziglar

27. If people only knew how hard I’ve worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. – Michelangelo

Not making excuses

28. If it’s important to you, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.

29. Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. – H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Perseverance

30. Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. – Joshua J. Marine

31. Life has two rules: 1) Never quit. 2) Always remember Rule #1.

32. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. – Michael Jordan

33. I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits the bottom. – George S. Patton

34. If you’re going through hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill

35. Don’t let your victories go to your head, or your failures go to your heart.

36. Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. – Henry Ford

37. You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there. – Ed Cole

38. The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping-stone is how high you raise your foot.

39. The pain you feel today is the strength you will feel tomorrow. For every challenge encountered there is opportunity for growth.

40. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be worth it.



Everyone Has a Story in Life

A 24 year old boy seeing out from the train’s window shouted…

“Dad, look the trees are going behind!”

Dad smiled and a young couple sitting nearby, looked at the 24 year old’s childish behavior with pity, suddenly he again exclaimed…

“Dad, look the clouds are running with us!”

The couple couldn’t resist and said to the old man…

“Why don’t you take your son to a good doctor?” The old man smiled and said…“I did and we are just coming from the hospital, my son was blind from birth, he just got his eyes today.”

Every single person on the planet has a story. Don’t judge people before you truly know them. The truth might surprise you.

Shake off Your Problems

A man’s favorite donkey falls into a deep precipice. He can’t pull it out no matter how hard he tries. He therefore decides to bury it alive.

Soil is poured onto the donkey from above. The donkey feels the load, shakes it off, and steps on it. More soil is poured.

It shakes it off and steps up. The more the load was poured, the higher it rose. By noon, the donkey was grazing in green pastures.

The Elephant Rope

As a man was passing the elephants, he suddenly stopped, confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at anytime, break away from their bonds but for some reason, they did not.

He saw a trainer nearby and asked why these animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away. “Well,” trainer said, “when they are very young and much smaller we use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.”

The man was amazed. These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.

Like the elephants, how many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we failed at it once before?

Failure is part of learning; we should never give up the struggle in life.

Potatoes, Eggs, and Coffee Beans

Once upon a time a daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn’t know how she was going to make it. She was tired of fighting and struggling all the time. It seemed just as one problem was solved, another one soon followed.

Her father, a chef, took her to the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Once the three pots began to boil, he placed potatoes in one pot, eggs in the second pot, and ground coffee beans in the third pot.

He then let them sit and boil, without saying a word to his daughter. The daughter, moaned and impatiently waited, wondering what he was doing.

After twenty minutes he turned off the burners. He took the potatoes out of the pot and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl.

He then ladled the coffee out and placed it in a cup. Turning to her he asked. “Daughter, what do you see?”

“Potatoes, eggs, and coffee,” she hastily replied.

“Look closer,” he said, “and touch the potatoes.” She did and noted that they were soft. He then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg. Finally, he asked her to sip the coffee. Its rich aroma brought a smile to her face.

“Father, what does this mean?” she asked.

He then explained that the potatoes, the eggs and coffee beans had each faced the same adversity– the boiling water.

However, each one reacted differently.

The potato went in strong, hard, and unrelenting, but in boiling water, it became soft and weak.

The egg was fragile, with the thin outer shell protecting its liquid interior until it was put in the boiling water. Then the inside of the egg became hard.

However, the ground coffee beans were unique. After they were exposed to the boiling water, they changed the water and created something new.

“Which are you,” he asked his daughter. “When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a potato, an egg, or a coffee bean? “

Moral:In life, things happen around us, things happen to us, but the only thing that truly matters is what happens within us.

Which one are you?

A Dish of Ice Cream

In the days when an ice cream sundae cost much less, a 10 year old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him.

“How much is an ice cream sundae?”

“50 cents,” replied the waitress.

The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied a number of coins in it.

“How much is a dish of plain ice cream?” he inquired. Some people were now waiting for a table and the waitress was a bit impatient.

“35 cents,” she said brusquely.

The little boy again counted the coins. “I’ll have the plain ice cream,” he said.

The waitress brought the ice cream, put the bill on the table and walked away. The boy finished the ice cream, paid the cashier and departed.

When the waitress came back, she began wiping down the table and then swallowed hard at what she saw.

There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were 15 cents – her tip.

The Three Trees

Once there were three trees on a hill in the woods. They were discussing their hopes and dreams when the first tree said "Someday I hope to be a treasure chest. I could be filled with gold, silver and precious gems. I could be decorated with intricate carving and everyone would see the beauty." Then the second tree said, "Someday I will be a mighty ship. I will take kings and queens across the waters and sail to the corners of the world. Everyone will feel safe in me because of the strength of my hull." Finally the third tree said, "I want to grow to be the tallest and straightest tree in the forest. People will see me on top of the hill and look up to my branches, and think of the heavens and God and how close to them I am reaching. I will be the greatest tree of all time and people will always remember me." After a few years of praying that their dreams would come true, a group of woodsmen came upon the trees. When one came to the first tree he said, "This looks like a strong tree, I think I should be able to sell the wood to a carpenter, "and he began cutting it down. The tree was happy, because he knew that the carpenter would make him into a treasure chest. At the second tree the woodsman said, "This looks like a strong tree, I should be able to sell it to the shipyard." The second tree was happy because he knew he was on his way to becoming a mighty ship. When the woodsmen came upon the third tree, the tree was frightened because he knew that if they cut him down his dreams would not come true. One of the woodsmen said, "I don't need anything special from my tree, I'll take this one," and he cut it down. When the first tree arrived at the carpenters, he was made into a feed box for animals. He was then placed in a barn and filled with hay. This was not at all what he had prayed for. The second tree was cut and made into a small fishing boat. His dreams of being a mighty ship and carrying kings had come to an end. The third tree was cut into large pieces and left alone in the dark. The years went by, and the trees forgot about their dreams. Then one day, a man and woman came to the barn. She gave birth and they placed the baby in the hay in the feed box that was made from the first tree. The man wished that he could have made a crib for the baby, but this manger would have to do. The tree could feel the importance of this event and knew that it had held the greatest treasure of all time. Years later, a group of men got in the fishing boat made from the second tree. One of them was tired and went to sleep. While they were out on the water, a great storm arose and the tree didn't think it was strong enough to keep the men safe. The men woke the sleeping man, and He stood and said "Peace" and the storm stopped. At this time, the tree knew that it had carried the King of Kings in its boat. Finally, someone came and got the third tree. It was carried through the streets as the people mocked the man who was carrying it. When they came to a stop, the man was nailed to the tree and raised in the air to die at the top of a hill. When Sunday came, the tree came to realize that it was strong enough to stand at the top of the hill and be as close to God as was possible, because Jesus had been crucified on it. The moral of this story is that when things don't seem to be going your way, always know that God has a plan for you. If you place your trust in Him, He will give you great gifts. Each of the trees got what they wanted, just not in the way they had imagined. We don't always know what God's plans are for us. We just know that His ways are not our ways, but His ways are always best.

Wealth, Success and Love

A woman came out of her house and saw 3 old men with long white beards sitting in her front yard. She did not recognize them. She said "I don't think I know you, but you must be hungry. Please come in and have something to eat." "Is the man of the house home?", they asked. "No", she said. "He's out." "Then we cannot come in," they replied. In the evening when her husband came home, she told him what had happened. "Go tell them I am home and invite them in!" he said. The woman went out and invited the men in. "We do not go into a House together," they replied. "Why is that?" she wanted to know. One of the old men explained: "His name is Wealth," he said pointing to one of his friends, and said pointing to another one, "He is Success, and I am Love." Then he added, "Now go in and discuss with your husband which one of us you want in your home." The woman went in and told her husband what was said. Her husband was overjoyed. "How nice!!," he said. "Since that is the case, let us invite Wealth. Let him come and fill our home with wealth!" His wife disagreed. "My dear, why don't we invite Success?" Their daughter-in-law was listening from the other corner of the house. She jumped in with her own suggestion: "Would it not be better to invite Love? Our home will then be filled with love!" "Let us heed our daughter-in-law's advice," said the husband to his wife. "Go out and invite Love to be our guest." The woman went out and asked the 3 old men, "Which one of you is Love? Please come in and be our guest." Love got up and started walking toward the house. The other 2 also got up and followed him. Surprised, the lady asked Wealth and Success: "I only invited Love, Why are you coming in?" The old men replied together: "If you had invited Wealth or Success, the other two of us would've stayed out, but since you invited Love, wherever He goes, we go with him. Wherever there is Love, there is also Wealth and Success!!!!!!"



Apply yourself

“You need to apply yourself to your studies and be able to cope. I am blind but I was able to succeed,” said Hlulani Malungani of Revoni School for the Blind in Limpopo. Malungani is visually impaired and among the top achievers of 2016. He also advised those wishing to emulate his success not to be easily distracted by challenges.

Study smart

“Study smart and you will excel. Work hard and you will achieve good marks,” Duncan Xihlovo of Risinga High School in Gyani, Limpopo, said.

Hard work pays off

“Work hard and never let anything distract you,” said Conrad Strydom of Hermanus Hoerskool in the Western Cape.

Be committed

“There is no particular formula I used, it’s all about dedication and being committed. If you work hard it does pay off,” said Hannah Jane Clayton of Rustenburg High School for Girls in Cape Town.

Plan ahead

“Studying became my hobby. You just need to plan, have a timetable and success will follow,” said Madiba Nyandano of Tshivhase Secondary School in Limpopo.

"I put God first in everything. “I also went over past papers when I was preparing for the exams," he said. Jivashenb of iLembe in KZN



1. “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.” – Paul Halmos

2. “The journey is the reward.” —Chinese Proverb

3. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” —Abraham Lincoln

4. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” –Winston Churchill

5. “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” –Pele

6. “Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” –Sally Ride

7. “Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.” –Theodore N. Vail

8. “People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” –Tony Robbins

9. “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” –Zig Ziglar

10. “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” –Francis Chan

11. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” –Pablo Picasso

12. “No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en. In brief, sir, study what you most affect.” ― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

13. “No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.” –Anonymous

14. Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” –Jim Ryun

15. Learning is like rowing upstream, not to advance is to drop back.” —Chinese Proverb

16. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.” —Albert Einstein

17. “It is wiser to find out than to suppose.” —Mark Twain

18. “It does not matter where you go and what you study, what matters most is what you share with yourself and the world.”― Santosh Kalwar

19. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” –Steve Jobs

20. “In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.” –Jane Smiley

21. “If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!” –T. Harv Eker

22. “If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.” –Drew Houston

23. “If education were the same as information, the encyclopedias would be the greatest sages in the world.” ―Abhijit Naskar

24. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” –Thomas Jefferson

25. “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” –C.S. Lewis

26. “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” —Will Rogers

27. “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” —B. F. Skinner

28. “Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life.”―Abhijit Naskar

29. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” –Anonymous

30. “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” —William Butler Yeats

31. “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” –Wayne Dyer

32. “Be a student as long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life.” —Henry L. Doherty

33. “All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.” –Michael John Bobak

34. “Acquiring knowledge is the most fruitful effort.” ―Eraldo Banovac

35. “In real life, there is no such thing as second place. Either you are a winner, or you’re not.” –Anonymous

36 “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” –George Lorimer

37. “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” –Margaret Thatcher

38. “Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.” – Shakuntala Devi

39. “When it’s finals week and you’ve been studying for five hours straight, you need three things to get you through the night. The biggest Slurpee you can find, half cherry half Coke. Pajama pants, the kind that have been washed so many times they are tissue-paper thin. And finally, dance breaks. Lots of dance breaks.” ― Jenny Han

40. “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”—Goethe

41. “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” – Oscar Wilde

42. “We do what we have to so we can do what we want to.” ― James Farmer

43. “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” – Albert Einstein

44. “Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain.” – Anonymous

45. “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”― Marilyn Vos Savant

46. “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” –Bruce Lee

47. “The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.” – Charles Caleb Colton

48. “The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.” –Denis Watiley

49. “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live.”—Mortimer Adler

50. “The point is, education in its truest form, is the foundation of all human endeavors. It is the most noble of all the civilized elements of human consciousness. Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life. The ability of being educated is what distinguishes humans from animals. You can teach a cockatoo to repeat a bunch of vocabularies, but you cannot teach it to construct a space shuttle and go to the moon.” – Abhijit Naskar

Many students have experienced terrible times when they thought that the only option they had was to give up. We’re sure everyone can agree that school life can be hard and sometimes, it has the ability to bring out the worst in us, pushing us down to our lowest point. However, as the famous saying goes, diamonds cannot be polished without friction. To create a more valuable future, we have to courageously take on and overcome the challenges that we face every day.



1. "Failure isn't fatal, but failure to change might be" - John Wooden

2. "Everything you want is on the other side of fear." - Jack Canfield

3. “Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.” - Coco Chanel

4. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

5. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.” - Janet Fitch

6. “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson

7. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” - Gena Showalter

8. “If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want” - Richard Yates

9. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” - Denis Waitley

10. “When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” - Ellen DeGeneres

11. “It's failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” - Ellen DeGeneres

12. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Chris Bradford

13. “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas A. Edison

14. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill

15. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” - Paulo Coelho

16. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” - Lance Armstrong

17. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

18. “I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman

19. “We are all failures - at least the best of us are.” - J.M. Barrie

20. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford

21. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” - C.S. Lewis

22. “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” - Robert T. Kiyosaki

23. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” - Napoleon Hill

24. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” - Johnny Cash

25. “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.” - Zig Ziglar

26. “Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.” - J.K. Rowling

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