Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Fillmore

Opportunity, in Fillmore's hands, isn't a lottery ticket. It's a discipline. "There are opportunities everywhere" sounds like boosterism until the second clause tightens the screw: "just as there have always been". That add-on drains the line of novelty and excuses. If opportunities have always existed, then today's scarcity story (the idea that we live in uniquely closed, uniquely rigged times) becomes less a diagnosis than a mood. The sentence quietly relocates responsibility from the era to the individual: the world hasn't suddenly run out; our attention, courage, or imagination has.

Fillmore lived through industrial upheaval, boom-and-bust cycles, mass migration, and the First World War into the Great Depression. The phrase "have always been" reads like a corrective to panic. It's not denial of hardship so much as a refusal to let hardship be the only frame. As an educator, he's also making a pedagogical claim: opportunity is something you learn to perceive. The "everywhere" isn't geographic; it's cognitive. Train the mind to scan for openings, and the environment starts to look different.

The subtext is almost contrarian in its calm. If you're waiting for a special moment, a perfect system, or a permission slip from history, you're already losing. Fillmore isn't promising success; he's insisting that the raw material for agency is permanently on the table. The challenge is whether you'll recognize it as such.