"With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve"
About this Quote
Spoken by the founder of Pakistan at a moment when a new state was struggling to stand, the line is both a personal credo and a program for collective action. Faith, for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was not only religious conviction; it was steadiness of mind, confidence in a just cause, and trust in one another. Discipline named the hard edge of freedom: rules, institutions, and habits that convert aspiration into outcomes. Selfless devotion to duty set the ethical horizon, insisting that public service be cleansed of vanity, faction, and personal gain.
The claim is audacious yet sober. Audacious because it posits no ceiling on achievement when these virtues align; sober because it implies that without them, even modest aims can falter. In the years around Partition, millions were on the move, violence scarred communities, and administrative machinery had to be built from scratch. Jinnah repeatedly urged civil servants, soldiers, and citizens to work impartially, obey the law, and put the common good first. The line distills that appeal: a nation cannot be willed into being by sentiment alone; it must be engineered through character.
There is a personal resonance too. Jinnah’s own career was marked by meticulous work habits, legal precision, and perseverance despite failing health. His triad echoes his broader motto of unity, faith, and discipline, but shifts the emphasis toward public duty, tying the individual’s moral choices to national destiny. The word worthwhile is telling. Not everything is worth achieving; what is valuable tends to be difficult, and difficulty is precisely what faith, discipline, and selflessness are designed to overcome.
Read today, the sentence is neither romantic nor naive. It is a compact theory of progress: conviction provides direction, discipline supplies method, and selfless duty protects the enterprise from corrosion. Where they converge, people move beyond survival toward durable achievement, whether building a state, an institution, or a life.
The claim is audacious yet sober. Audacious because it posits no ceiling on achievement when these virtues align; sober because it implies that without them, even modest aims can falter. In the years around Partition, millions were on the move, violence scarred communities, and administrative machinery had to be built from scratch. Jinnah repeatedly urged civil servants, soldiers, and citizens to work impartially, obey the law, and put the common good first. The line distills that appeal: a nation cannot be willed into being by sentiment alone; it must be engineered through character.
There is a personal resonance too. Jinnah’s own career was marked by meticulous work habits, legal precision, and perseverance despite failing health. His triad echoes his broader motto of unity, faith, and discipline, but shifts the emphasis toward public duty, tying the individual’s moral choices to national destiny. The word worthwhile is telling. Not everything is worth achieving; what is valuable tends to be difficult, and difficulty is precisely what faith, discipline, and selflessness are designed to overcome.
Read today, the sentence is neither romantic nor naive. It is a compact theory of progress: conviction provides direction, discipline supplies method, and selfless duty protects the enterprise from corrosion. Where they converge, people move beyond survival toward durable achievement, whether building a state, an institution, or a life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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