Andrew Carnegie Quotes
1. A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.
2. As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
3. People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
4. If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
5. A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.
6. No man becomes rich unless he enriches others.
7. Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
8. The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.
9. There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
10. It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you could do alone.
11. He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
12. When fate hands us a lemon, let’s try to make lemonade.
13. Perhaps the most tragic thing about mankind is that we are all dreaming about some magical garden over the horizon, instead of enjoying the roses that are right outside today.
14. All human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.
15. Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
16. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb a little.
17. Success is getting what you want.
Happiness is wanting what you get.
18. TEAMWORK: the fuel that allows common people attain uncommon results.
19. Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.
20. Do real and permanent good in this world.
21. To summarize what I have said: Aim for the highest; never enter a bar-room; do not touch liquor, or if at all only at meals; never speculate; never indorse beyond your surplus cash fund; make the firm’s interest yours; break orders always to save owners; concentrate; put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket; expenditure always within revenue; lastly, be not impatient, for, as Emerson says, “no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.” I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honourable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work. A basketful of bonds is the heaviest basket a young man ever had to carry. He generally gets to staggering under it. We have in this city creditable instances of such young men, who have pressed to the front rank of our best and most useful citizens. These deserve great credit. But the vast majority of the sons of rich men are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them, and sink to unworthy lives. I would almost as soon leave a young man a curse, as burden him with the almighty dollar. It is not from this class you have rivalry to fear. The partner’s sons will not trouble you much, but look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves, whose parents cannot afford to give them the advantages of a course in this institute, advantages which should give you a decided lead in the race–look out that such boys do not challenge you at the post and pass you at the grand stand. Look out for the boy who has to plunge into work direct from the common school and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark horse that you had better watch.
22. Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark…. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. ~Germaine Greer
23. Pittsburgh entered the core of my heart when I was a boy and cannot be torn out.
24. Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself
25. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it
26. I don’t believe in God. My God is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life.
27. Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth
28. There is little success where there is little laughter.
29. And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.
30. As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do.
31. Men are developed the same way gold is mined. When gold is mined, several tons of dirt must be moved to get an ounce of gold; but one doesn’t go into the mine looking for dirt—one goes in looking for the gold.
32. A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind, like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.
33. This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community–the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
34. People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how great their other talents.
35. We cannot afford to lose the Negro. We have urgent need of all and more. Let us therefore turn our efforts to making the best of him.
36. I am as a speck of dust in the sun, and not even so much, in this solemn, mysterious, unknowable universe.
37. Humanity is an organism, inherently rejecting all that is deleterious, that is, wrong, and absorbing after trial what is beneficial, that is, right. If so disposed, the Architect of the Universe, we must assume, might have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this life and our duties here. “To perform the duties of this world well, troubling not about another, is the prime wisdom,” says Confucius, great sage and teacher. The next world and its duties we shall consider when we are placed in it.
38. All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.
39. Not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution.
40. The result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace. Where there had been chaos there was now order. My mind was at rest. I had a philosophy at last. The words of Christ “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” had a new meaning for me. Not in the past or in the future, but now and here is Heaven within us. All our duties lie in this world and in the present, and trying impatiently to peer into that which lies beyond is as vain as fruitless.
41. If the newspapers begin to publish stories about wars, and the people begin to think and talk of war in their daily conversations, they soon find themselves at war. People get that which their minds dwell upon, and this applies to a group or community or a nation of people, the same as to an individual
42. Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious—being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so—still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself.
43. It is now thirteen years since I ceased to accumulate wealth and began to distribute it. I could never have succeeded in either had I stopped with having enough to retire upon, but nothing to retire to.
44. This is where the children of honest poverty have the most precious of all advantages over those of wealth. The mother, nurse, cook, governess, teacher, saint, all in one; the father, exemplar, guide, counselor, and friend! Thus were my brother and I brought up. What has the child of millionaire or nobleman that counts compared to such a heritage?
45. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or get all credit for doing it.
46. Among the conditions of life or the laws of Nature, some of which seem to us faulty, some apparently unjust and merciless, there are many that amaze us by their beauty and sweetness. Love of home, regardless of its character or location, certainly is one of these.
47. Ninety percent of all millionaires become so through owing real estate.
48. I believe that higher wages to men who respect their employers and are happy and contented are a good investment, yielding, indeed, big dividends.
49. That best portion of a good man’s life— His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.
50. Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.
51. Boulton sold the estate which had come to him by his wife, and the greater part of his father’s property, and mortgaged the remainder. It is evident that the great captain had taken in hand far too many enterprises. Probably he had not heard the new doctrine: “Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.
52. He that cannot reason is a fool, He that will not a bigot, He that dare not a slave.
53. East or West Home is best.
54. Certainly the man who makes his own wealth eclipses those who inherit rank from others.
55. The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
56. I have never known a concern to make a decided success that did not do good, honest work, and even in these days of the fiercest competition, when everything would seem to be a matter of price, there lies still at the root of great business success the very much more important factor of quality.
57. An iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road of the common construction.” Here lay in a few words the idea from which our railway system has sprung.
58. Their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good. Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire
59. No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it.
60. Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
