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Promise is most given when the least is said.
Sep 18, 2025
Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.
It is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.
The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self, with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.
Integrity is conforming reality to our words - in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.
This is the first convention of the space age - where a candidate can promise the moon and mean it.
Don't make promises you can't keep.
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.
If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it.
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.
It's useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.
Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.
Never trust a man when he's in love, drunk, or running for office.
The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.
The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.
Deliver more than you promise.
One promises much, to avoid giving little.
When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water.
The promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.
Promises may get thee friends, but non-performance will turn them into enemies.
Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition.
Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned.
The politician's promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.
It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.
Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep.
Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth.
Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.
We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.
Thou oughtest to be nice, even to Superstition, in keeping thy Promises; and therefore thou shouldst be equally cautious in making them.
I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you.
Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once.
A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
April is a promise that May is bound to keep.
But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.
When a man repeats a promise again and again, he means to fail you.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.
Making promises to myself, in my personal writing practice, has been important to me all my life. In practical application it is so much easier for me to make promises to others, and keep them, than it is to make promises to myself. "Why is that?" and the answer I gave myself is that in making promises to others I create a model of accountability and reinforcement. I duplicate that in my writing and have grown increasingly better at making and keeping promises to myself.
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.