Promise Quotes

Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. - Author Unknown

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. - Hannah Arendt

Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made. - Edgar Watson Howe

We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears. - François VI de la Rochefoucault

Oaths are but words, and words but wind. - Samuel Butler

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. - Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876

It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath. - Aeschylus

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. - Napoleon Bonaparte

When a man takes an oath... he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he needn't hope to find himself again. - Robert Bolt

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it. - Norman Douglas

Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All promise outruns performance. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thou ought to be nice, even to superstition, in keeping thy promises, and therefore equally cautious in making them. - Thomas Fuller

Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once. - Norman Vincent Peale

He loses his thanks who promises and delays. - Proverb

Promise is most given when the least is said. - George Chapman

Eggs and oaths are easily broken. - Danish Proverb

Nothing weights lighter than a promise. - German Proverb

A promise made is a debt unpaid. - Robert Service

Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken. - Jonathan Swift

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise. - William Dean Howells

Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep. - Denis Waitley

We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. - Abraham Lincoln

For every promise, there is price to pay. - Jim Rohn

The promises of yesterday are the taxes of today. - William Lyon MacKenzie

Promises are like the full moon, if they are not kept at once they diminish day by day. - German Proverb

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises that one makes. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Better break your word than do worse in keeping it. - Thomas Fuller

Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them. - William Hazlitt

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present. - Niccolò Machiavelli

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing. - Edmund Burke

Oaths are the fossils of piety. - George Santayana

Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing. - Bernard M. Baruch

Let God's promises shine on your problems. - Corrie Ten Boom

Promises make debt, and debt makes promises. - Dutch Proverb

A promise is a comfort for a fool. - Proverb

He was ever precise in promise-keeping. - William Shakespeare

When a man repeats a promise again and again, he means to fail you. - Proverb

A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain. - Arabian Proverb

I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises. - Author Unknown

 

It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he is in love, drunk, or running for office. - Shirley MacLaine

And be these juggling friends no more believ'd,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear
And break it to our hope.
- William Shakespeare

Promise little and do much. - Hebrew Proverb

Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise. - Author Unknown

This is the first convention of the space age — where a candidate can promise the moon and mean it. - Author Unknown

The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill 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. - Carl Jung

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise. - Niccolò Machiavelli

Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught. - Sydney J. Harris

Life didn't promise to be wonderful. - Teddy Pendergrass

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform. - William Penn

Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth. - Mohandas Gandhi

A promise is a debt. - Proverb

A liar is always lavish of oaths. - Pierre Corneille

Everyone's a millionaire where promises are concerned. - Author Unknown

In the midst of great joy, do not promise anyone anything. In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter. - Chinese Proverb

Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the performance of it. - Jean Jacques Rousseau

Between today and tomorrow are graves, and between promising and fulfilling are chasms. - Author Unknown

No pillow so soft as God's promise. - Author Unknown

One promises much, to avoid giving little. - Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. - Wayne Dyer

God's promises are like the stars; the darker the night the brighter they shine. - David Nicholas

Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans. - Peter F. Drucker

Being of no power to make his wishes good:
His promises fly so beyond his state
That what he speaks is all in debt; he owes
For every word.
- William Shakespeare

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits. - William Shakespeare

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality. - Harold Geneen

 

Promises may fit the friends, but non-performance will turn them into enemies. - Benjamin Franklin

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice — no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. - John Burroughs

A politician is known by the promises he keeps. - Author Unknown

The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague. - Bill Cosby

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat? - Chuck Palahniuk

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven. - Will Rogers

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep...
- Robert Frost

April is a promise that May is bound to keep. - Hal Borland

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. - Karl Popper

But as the arms-control scholar Thomas Schelling once noted, two things are very expensive in international life: promises when they succeed and threats when they fail. - Fareed Zakaria

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. - Marcel Proust

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. - Simone Weil

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers. - Nikita Khrushchev

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. - Samuel Johnson

In executing the duties of my present important station, I can promise nothing but purity of intentions, and, in carrying these into effect, fidelity and diligence. - George Washington