I will prepare and someday my chance will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death

- James F. Bymes

Today a thousand doors of enterprise are open to you, inviting you to useful work. To live at this time is an inestimable privilege, and a sacred obligation devolves upon you to make right use of your opportunities. Today is the day in which to attempt and achieve something worthwhile.

- Grenville Kleiser

Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.

- Alan Cohen

Sometimes opportunity knocks, but most of the time it sneaks up and then quietly steals away.

- Doug Larson

Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world. Stand in your own dooryard and you have eight thousand miles of solid ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors overhead.

- John Borroughs

Nature abhors a vacuum.

- Baruch Spinoza

Nature creates ability; luck provides it with opportunity.

- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

- Ovid

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

If you believe that you can damage, then believe that you can fix.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

No great man ever complains of want of opportunities.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What you focus on expands, and when you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.

- Oprah Winfrey

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. it's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

- Barack Obama

The essence of democracy is its assurance that every human being should so respect himself and should be so respected in his own personality that he should have opportunity equal to that of every other human being to show what he was meant to become.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.

- Christina Rossetti

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

- Hugh Miller

... without darkness
Nothing comes to birth,
As without light
Nothing flowers.

- May Sarton

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

- Bishop Desmond Tutu

Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.

- Anne Sullivan

Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

- Thomas Alva Edison

Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

- Ovid

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

- Helen Keller

In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.

- Albert Einstein

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man's skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.

- C. Wright Mills

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

There is no security on this earth. Only opportunity.

- Douglas MacArthur

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

- Irving Kristol

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

- Demosthenes