If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.

—Nora Roberts

Laugh at yourself, but don’t ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don’t leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

—Alan Alda

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.                    —Mark Twain

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

—George Eliot

There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

—John F. Kennedy

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity; they seem more afraid of life than of death.

—James F. Byrnes

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

—Kurt Vonnegut

Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated.

—Robert Frost

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

—Gertrude Stein

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

—Mignon McLaughlin

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

—Sir Cecil Beaton

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

–Walter Anderson

To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily.  To not dare is to lose oneself. 

–Soren Kierkegaard

I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I’m not afraid of falling into my inkpot.

 –Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fear of being laughed at makes cowards of us all.

–Mignon McLaughlin

You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.

–Wayne Gretzky

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

–Seneca

One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

–Chinese Proverb