Robert Baden-Powell Quotes

Leave this world a little better than you found it.

Try to leave this world a little better than you found it and, when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best

The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.

We never fail when we try to do our duty, we always fail when we neglect to do it.

Look wide, and even when you think you are looking wide - look wider still.

A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

Look wide, beyond your immediate surroundings and limits, and you see things in their right proportion. Look above the level of things around you and see a higher aim and possibility to your work.

I have over and over again explained that the purpose of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide Movement is to build men and women as citizens endowed with the three H's namely, Health, Happiness and Helpfulness. The man or woman who succeeds in developing these three attributes has secured the main steps to success this Life.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

Happiness is not mere pleasure, not the outcome of wealth. It is the result of active work rather than passive enjoyment of pleasure.

Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.

A Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances.

Girls should be brought up to be comrades and helpers, not to be dolls. They should take a real and not a visionary share in the welfare of the nation.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

"Be Prepared." "Be prepared for what?" "Why, for any old thing."

Happiness is open to all, since, when you boil it down, it merely consists of contentment with what you have got and doing what you can for other people.

In Scouting, a boy is encouraged to educate himself instead of being instructed.

The great thing that strikes you on looking back is how quickly you have come-how very brief is the span of life on this earth. The warning that one would give, therefore, is that it is well not to fritter it away on things that don't count in the end; nor on the other hand is it good to take life too seriously as some seem to do. Make it a happy life while you have it. That is where success is possible to every man.

An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.

Scouting is not an abstruse or difficult science: rather it is a jolly game if you take it in the right light. In the same time it is educative, and (like Mercy) it is apt to benefit him that giveth as well as him that receives.

The uniform makes for brotherhood, since when universally adopted it covers up all differences of class and country.

O God, help me to win, but in thy wisdom if thou willest me not to win, then O God, make me a good loser.

The secret of sound education is to get each pupil to learn for himself, instead of instructing him by driving knowledge into him on a stereotyped system.

Success in training the boy depends largely on the Scoutmaster's own personal example.