Acres Of Diamonds Quotes

Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or in yonder seas; they are in your own backyard, if you but dig for them.

Begin where you are and what you are.

Things you can buy with half a million dollars: a car that looks more like a space creature than a car. A designer platinum purse to carry a small dog. A small dog. A performance by your favorite musical artist for your birthday. A diamond-encrusted bottle of Dominican rum. A mansion. A yacht. A hundred acres of land. Houses, but not homes. All four years of college or beautician school & certificate. Five hundred flights to the Dominican Republic. A half million Dollar Store chess sets, with their accompanying boxes. A hundred thousand copies of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Apparently a father.

True greatness is often unrecognized.

It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test of an orator's control of his audience to be able to land them again on the solid earth of sober thinking.

Abraham Lincoln's principle for greatness can be adopted by nearly all. This was his rule: Whatsoever he had to do at all, he put his whole mind into it and held it all there until that was all done.

You cannot trust a man with your money who cannot take care of his own.

Do you ever see a man who struts around altogether too large to notice an ordinary working mechanic? Do you think he is great? He is nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by his big feet. There is no greatness there.

A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers. That higher birthrate of food producers, together with their ability to feed more people per acre, lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.

people to make money, the great minister Russel H. Conwell, author of Acres of Diamonds, said, “Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them.

By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

Remember that successful action is cumulative in its results. Since the desire for more life is inherent in all things, when a man begins to move toward larger life more things attach themselves to him, and the influence of his desire is multiplied.

As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.

Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to food production in the Fertile Crescent began around 8500 B.C., not around 18,500 or 28,500 B.C. At the latter two dates hunting-gathering was still much more rewarding than incipient food production, because wild mammals were still abundant; wild cereals were not yet abundant; people had not yet developed the inventions necessary for collecting, processing, and storing cereals efficiently; and human population densities were not yet high enough for a large premium to be placed on extracting more calories per acre.

man,' I said to him, 'with the proper determination and ambition can study sufficiently at night to win his desire.

and again, what was it he would have possibly been looking at? Mac turned all the way around and looked back down the county road to the east. There were some interspersed homes visible on larger multi-acre plots of land. Farther to the southeast he could make out some blue water that he knew was Diamond Lake, but that was as far as a mile away. He knew that

remember if you know what people need you have gotten more knowledge of a fortune than any amount of capital can give you.

His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, that everywhere, if people looked closely enough, were “acres of diamonds.” A sampling: I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich…. The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly … ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men…. … I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins … is to do wrong…. let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings

Not since Mr. Kaiser,” they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents’ childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condemned them to live out their lives in California exile among only their token mementos, the calabashes and the carved palace chairs and the flat silver for forty-eight and the diamond that had been Queen Liliuokalani’s and the heavy linens embroidered on all the long golden afternoons that were no more.

As a boy, he had worked as a carter for the 5th Duke of Portland, wheeling stone from the local quarry, used to construct a vast network of underground rooms that extended for twelve miles under the Welbeck estate. There was a ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people and a riding school with a gallop a quarter of a mile long, lit by 8,000 jets of gas. One tunnel led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to stables, cow-houses and dairies, where more than sixty people were employed.

...how dawn started in the pine tops in the surrounding woods, light the color of butter freshly churned eventually rolling down to brighten the East Texas thicket, the rising sun making diamonds of the dewdrops on the lush green lawn of the back eight acres, where on any day of the week you might see a fawn poke its white-capped head out from the trees, eyes a glassy green, its black button nose sniffing at the same honey-sweet scent of wet grass and pine as you......

sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving

in your housekeeping, whatever your life, that one thing is the secret of success. You must first know the demand. You must first know what people need, and then invest yourself where you are most needed.

own. You cannot trust a man in your family that is not true to his own wife. You cannot trust a man in the world that does not begin with his own heart, his own character, and his own life.

The moment a young man or woman gets more money than he or she has grown to by practical experience, that moment he has gotten a curse. It is no help to a young man or woman to inherit money. It is no help to your children to leave them money, but if you leave them education, if you leave them Christian and noble character, if you leave them a wide circle of friends, if you leave them an honorable name, it is far better than that they should have money.

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and what you are, in Philadelphia, now. He that can give to his city any blessing, he who can be a good citizen while he lives here, he that can make better homes, he that can be a blessing whether he works in the shop or sits behind the counter or keeps house, whatever be his life, he who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.

The opportunity to attain great wealth is within the reach of almost every man and woman. Let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.

He was contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented.

One powerful takeaway of Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” lecture is that there are opportunities and wealth (i.e., Cash Providers) right in your own backyard. And you don’t need to be born into a certain type of family, have a country club membership, or go to a certain school to get connected to people with money to invest with you. Take a look around—you are already standing on your own acres of diamonds.