Quote

1898Oyster Bay, New York, USA

There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live – I have no use for the sour-faced man – and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.

Read the full speech→Address to Boys at the Michigan State Agricultural College, Lansing, May 31, 1900

Similar Thoughts

Ralph Waldo Emerson·1847

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; ’Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Thomas à Kempis

Be thou never without something to do; be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or doing something that is useful to the community.

Viktor Frankl·1946

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

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More from Theodore Roosevelt

1903·White House

Believe you can and you're halfway there.

1905·White House

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

1910·The Sorbonne

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

Locus

Oyster Bay, New York, USA

Tempus