Improve opportunities. [ Proverb ]

Little opportunities should be improved. [ Fenélon ]

Our opportunities to do good are our talents. [ Dr. Mather ]

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. [ Proverb ]

Under the hands of unlucky persons, opportunities wax old. [ Proverb ]

Keep yourself from opportunities, and God will keep you from sins. [ Italian Proverb ]

To be a great man it is necessary to turn to account all opportunities. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Present opportunities are not to be neglected; they rarely visit us twice. [ Voltaire ]

Human happiness depends mainly upon the improvement of small opportunities. [ J. L. Basford ]

There are more men who have missed opportunities than there are who have lacked opportunities. [ La Beaumelle ]

The road to glory would cease to be arduous if it were trite and trodden; and great minds must be ready not only to take opportunities but to make them. [ Colton ]

Many do with opportunities as children do at the seashore; they fill their little hands with sand, and then let the grains fall through, one by one, till all are gone. [ Rev. T. Jones ]

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving. [ Whipple ]

Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. [ Colton ]

Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars. [ Whipple ]

Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing. [ Hillard ]

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. [ Hillard ]

Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Everyone must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised. [ Maltbie Babcock ]

I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you've got - meaning the chairman - if you've got one: I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]