Sermon quotes on opportunity
Alexander Graham Bell
Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.
Emily Dickinson
Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Albert Einstein
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Peter Marshall
May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.
Orison Swett Marden
Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.
T.A. McMahon
For the believer in Jesus, every trial of suffering is an opportunity to grow in the faith, to grow in our relationship with the Lord, and to see Him work in our lives in a uniquely personal way that demonstrates His compassion, His comfort, His tender mercies, His loving kindnesses, His grace, and His endless love. Only God knows what each of us needs to experience and learn in order to be “conformed to the image of his Son”.
Louis Pasteur
Chance favors the prepared mind.
John Wooden
When opportunity comes it is too late to prepare.
Zig Ziglar
Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.
Alan Jones
The opportunity for conversion is brief,
and our lives are littered with missed opportunities.
Soul Making
Henry David Thoreau
Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.
There is no other land; there is nothing else but this.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
My candle burns at both ends /
It will not last the night; /
But ah, my foes, and oh, my
It gives a lovely light!
First Fig
Stephen R. Covey
The root of opportunity is port, meaning the entryway by water into a city or place of business. In earlier days, when the tide and winds were right and the port opened, it allowed entry to do commerce, to visit, or to invade and conquer. But only those who recognized the opening could take advantage of the open port, or opportunity.
“Foreword,” in Kevin Hall, Aspire: Discovering Your Purpose Through the Power of Words (New York: William Morrow, 2009), xii.
Dallas Willard
When we call men and women to life in Christ Jesus, we are offering them the greatest opportunity of their lives—the opportunity of a vivid companionship with him, in which they will learn to be like him and live as he lived. This is that ‘transforming friendship’ explained by Leslie Weatherhead. We meet and dwell with Jesus and his Father in the disciplines for the spiritual life. As our meeting place, the disciplines are part of the good news of new life.
The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives. Reprint edition. San Francisco: HarperOne, xi, 1999.
Malcolm Gladwell
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantage and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
Outliers, Little, Brown, & Co. 2008, p.18.
Søren Kierkegaard
If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility.
Austin Farrer
Every day opportunity shortens, our scope for learning our Redeemer’s love is narrowed by twenty-four hours, and we come nearer to the end of our journey, when we shall fall into the hands of the living God, and touch the heart of the devouring fire.
The Crown of the Year, Dacre; Reprint Edition,1954.
Winston Churchill
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
(Probably apocryphal.)
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