How much wisdom can you pack into the 140 characters that Twitter provides for a tweet? Quite a bit. And it seems to help if you’re an accomplished person who isn’t on Twitter and, come to think of it, may have passed away decades before the Internet came to be.

At Exectweets, we love to share pithy insights from legendary thinkers via our Twitter feed, and are thrilled when they get retweeted–which they do, thousands of times over. While we pick quotations which we think are applicable in a business context, many of them are as much or more about living a life as they are about running a company, and they were said by smart folks from all walks of life.

Here, for convenient reading, are thirty-three of the ones we’ve recently tweeted.

“An acre of performance is worth a world of promise” -Red Auerbach

“3 Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” -Albert Einstein

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You’ve got to go up to the edge of the cliff, jump off, and build your wings on the way down.” –Ray Bradbury

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” –Thomas Edison

“What used to fit in a building now fits in a pocket, what fits in a pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 yrs” -Ray Kurzweil

“15% of one’s financial success is due one’s technical knowledge & 85% is due to skill in human engineering. ” –Dale Carnegie

“Learn as if you were to live forever, live as if you were to die tomorrow” -John Wooden

“Only 2 words always lead to success. Yes & no. You’ve mastered saying yes. So start practicing saying no.”–Jack Canfield

“Most discussions of decision making assume only senior executives make decisions. That’s a dangerous mistake.”-Peter Drucker

“The man who does not work for love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun.”–Charles Schwab

“We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”–Vince Lombardi

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If they’re any good you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. “-H. Aiken

“Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight. “–Henry Luce

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

“A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.”–Scott Allen

“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm. In the real world all rests on perseverance. “–Goethe

“Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent” -Marilyn vos Savant

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”–Albert Szent-Györgyi

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.”–Woodrow Wilson

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not are slaves” -Lord Byron

“Many great ideas go unexecuted. Many great executioners have no ideas. One without the other is worthless.”–Tim Blixseth

“The measure of success isn’t if you have a tough problem, but whether it’s the same one you had last year.”–John Foster Dulles

“Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. 90% of the time you haven’t.”–Peter Drucker

“In business it isn’t crooks who are to be feared most, it is honest men who don’t know what they are doing. “–William Wordsworth

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”–Elbert Hubbard

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

“I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with great caution.”–Wernher Von Braun

“It is not the employer who pays the wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages.”–Henry Ford

“Whenever there’s a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he’s sure to find an easy way to do it.”–Walter Chrysler

“The cynic says, ‘One man can’t do anything’. I say, ‘Only one man can do anything.’–John W. Gardner

“Make things as simple as they can be and as complex as they have to be” – William of Occam

Got any other quotes we should tweet?