Quotes by American Authors - Page 119

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more that of the sick who want something different and that of the traveler who says "Anywhere but here."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
Happiness to a dog is what lies on the other side of the door.
Charlton Ogburn
I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.
Kurt Vonnegut
Happiness is ... usually attributed by adults to children and by children to adults.
Thomas Szasz
When you don't have any money the problem is food. When you have money it's sex. When you have both it's health. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.
J.P. Donleavy
There is less in this than meets the eye.
Tallulah Bankhead
We love in others what we lack ourselves and would be everything but what we are.
R. H. Stoddard
There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.
Lillian Eichler Watson
Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!
Margaret Mitchell
The dream is real my friends. The failure to realize it is the only reality.
Toni Cade Bambara
You always admire what you really don't understand.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln
All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Eric Hoffer
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
T.S Eliot
What a good thing Adam had - when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Ezra Pound
We put things in order - God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is.
Horace Mann
When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
Will Durant
There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody anywhere anytime.
Calvin Coolidge
Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world gets better every day - then worse again in the evening.
Kin Hubbard
The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
Elbert Hubbard
A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.
Elbert Hubbard
An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed.
Kin Hubbard
To look up and not down To look forward and not back To look out and not in and To lend a hand.
Edward Everett Hale
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
Don Marquis
Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
Benjamin Franklin
Unless a man has trained himself for his chance the chance will only make him ridiculous.
William Matthews
If you want greater prosperity in your life start forming a vacuum to receive it.
Catherine Ponder
I always keep myself in a position of being a student.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready. And few people have ever been really ready without receiving opportunity's call.
Channing Pollock
The best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.
Ruth Gordon
We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity.
Walter E. Cole
Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.
Thomas F. Woodlock
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas A. Edison
What the student calls a tragedy the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Mark Twain
Vigilance in watching opportunity tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost possible achievement-these are the martial virtues which must command success.
Austin Phelps
The successful man is one who had the chance and took it.
Roger Babson
The opportunities for enjoyment in your life are limitless. If you feel you are not experiencing enough joy you have only yourself to blame.
David E. Bresler
When one door closes another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
Helen Keller
I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks but everyone also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on.
Samuel Goldwyn
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.
Eric Hoffer
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. ... To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly is the only way to meet supreme opportunities when they come whether open-faced or disguised.
Maltbie D. Babcock
Men do with opportunities as children do at the seashore they fill their little hands with sand and then let the grains fall through one by one till all are gone.
T. Jones
Great opportunities to help others seldom come but small ones come daily.
Ivy Baker Priest
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates all opportunities strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work so most people don't recognize them.
Ann Landers
The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland
A door that seems to stand open must be a man's size or it is not the door that Providence means for him.
Henry Ward Beecher
You can't make souffle rise twice.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.
Arthur Vandenberg
Opportunity knocks at every man's door once. On some men's door it hammers till it breaks down the door and then it goes in and wakes him up if he's asleep and ever afterward it works for him as a night watchman.
Finley Peter Dunne