Quotes by American Authors - Page 162

There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The proper function of man is to live-not to exist.
Jack London
Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
Joyce Carol Oates
I think the purpose of life is to be useful to be responsible to be honorable to be compassionate. It is after all to matter: to count to stand for something to have made some difference that you lived at all.
Leo. C Rosten
The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense to be emotionally sincere to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings one's work one's beliefs.
Karen Horney
If we want a free and peaceful world if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being-we can do it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
General George S. Patton
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
Benjamin Franklin
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
Henry Ford
True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one's self but the point is not only to get out you must stay out and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
Seek happiness for its own sake and you will not find it seek for duty and happiness will follow as the shadow comes with the sunshine.
Tyron Edwards
Duties are what make life most worth living. Lacking them you are not necessary to anyone.
Marlene Dietrich
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great.
Willa Cather
We need to restore the full meaning of that old word duty. It is the other side of rights.
Pearl S. Buck
If ambition doesn't hurt you you haven't got it.
Kathleen Norris
The self-confidence one builds from achieving difficult things and accomplishing goals is the most beautiful thing of all.
Madonna
Growth is not concerned with itself.
Meridel Le Sueur
A good goal is like a strenuous exercise-it makes you stretch.
Mary Kay Ash
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
John Mason Brown
You must learn day by day year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love the more you are interested in the more you enjoy the more you are indignant about the more you have left when anything happens.
Ethel Barrymore
Man can only receive what he sees himself receiving.
Florence Scovel Shinn
You can change your beliefs so they empower your dreams and desires. Create a strong belief in yourself and what you want.
Marcia Wieder
You have to erect a fence and say "Okay scale this."
Linda Ronstadt
Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.
Kathleen Norris
I never took a position we were going to be a good ball club. I took the position we were going to be a winning ball club.
Red Auerbach
Not failure but low aim is crime.
James Russell Lowell
Far away in the sunshine are my highest inspirations. I many not reach them but I can look up and see the beauty believe in them and try to follow where they lead.
Louisa May Alcott
We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood or exaggeration in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.
Les Brown
If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions.
Maude Adams
I truly believe that before I retire from public office I'll be voting for a woman for president.
Barbara Mikulski
Once you say you're going to settle for second that's what happens to you.
John F Kennedy
Your world is as big as you make it.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
I have the same goal I've had ever since I was a little girl. I want to rule the world.
Madonna
He who demands little gets it.
Ellen Glasgow
Tell them that as soon as I can walk I'm going to fly!
Bessie Coleman
I always ask the question "Is this what I want in my life?"
Kathy Ireland
Whatever course you have chosen for yourself it will not be a chore but an adventure if you bring to it a sense of the glory of striving if your sights are set far above the merely secure and mediocre.
David Sarnoff
I am always more interested in what I am about to do than in what I have already done.
Rachel Carson
What else are we gonna live by if not dreams? We need to believe in something. What would really drive us crazy is to believe this reality we run into every day is all there is. If I don't believe that there's a happy ending out there-that will-you-marry-me in the sky-I can't keep working today.
Jill Robinson
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never any of us are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Katherine Anne Porter
[My father] said Don't grow up to be a woman and what he meant by that was a housewife ... without any interests.
Maria Goeppert Mayer
A lot of young girls have looked to their career paths and have said they'd like to be chief. There's been a change in the limits people see.
Wilma Pearl Mankiller
My motto: sans limites.
Isadora Duncan
The brain is wider than the sky.
Emily Dickinson
I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.
Jacqueline Cochran
When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.
Leo Burnett
Someday someone will follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. And I wish him well.
Barbara Bush
I am comforted by life's stability by earth's unchangeableness. What has seemed new and frightening assumes its place in the unfolding of knowledge.
Pearl S. Buck
It's not enough to just swing at the ball. You've got to loosen your girdle and really let it fly.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done. ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past.
Clara Barton
Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
Josephine Baker
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore though they should fall immediately they had better aim at something high.
Henry David Thoreau
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
Nearly every glamorous wealthy successful career woman you might envy now started out as some kind of schlepp.
Helen Gurley Brown