Quotes by American Authors - Page 216

Anxiety is that range of distress which attends willing what cannot be willed.
Leslie H. Farber
Nothing you write if you hope to be any good will ever come out as you first hoped.
Lillian Hellman
We may fail of our happiness strive we ever so bravely but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.
Agnes Repplier
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
Louis L'Amour
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
Bernard M. Baruch
Each of us does in effect strike a series of "deals" or compromises between the wants and longings of the inner self and an outer environment that offers certain possibilities and sets certain limitations.
Maggie Scarf
The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.
Ram Dass
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody has things just as he would like them. The thing to do is to make a success with what material I have. It is a sheer waste of time and soul-power to imagine what I would do if things were different. They are not different.
Dr. Frank Crane
To exist is to adapt and if one could not adapt one died and made room for those who could.
Louis L'Amour
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities the strength the wisdom the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.
Charlton Ogburn
A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.
Eleanor R. Belmont
We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
Alexander Hamilton
There is no quality of human nature so nearly royal as the ability to yield gracefully.
Charles Conrad
Always fall in with what you're asked to accept.... My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.
Robert Frost
When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through it is best to meet it with firmness and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil while fretting and fuming only increase your own torments.
Thomas Jefferson
All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.
James A. Michener
You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it.
Louis L'Amour
Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
Agnes Turnbull
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away it is best to let him run.
Abraham Lincoln
She had believed the land was her enemy and she struggled against it but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it to belong to it to fit into its seasons and its ways.
Louis L'Amour
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
Louis L'Amour
If you can't fight and you can't flee flow.
Robert Eliot
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
Louis L'Amour
The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
Dave E. Smalley
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.
Charles Dudley Warner
No man can have society upon his own terms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how.
Henry Ward Beecher
The world is not to be put in order the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
Henry Miller
We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it including the thorns.
Orison Swett Marden
Whatever is-is best.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it and that is the grave.
Henry Ward Beecher
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
One cannot get through life without pain. ... What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.
Bernie S. Siegel
It is arrogance to expect that life will always be music.... Harmony like a following breeze at sea is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost our lot is to tack and tune.
Harvey Oxenhorn
A man shares his days with hunger thirst and cold with the good times and the bad and the first part of being a man is to understand that.
Louis L'Amour
Into each life some rain must fall some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
Joshua L. Liebman
Life has no smooth road for any of us and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps 'til the legend "over steep ways to the stars " fulfills self.
W. C. Doane
The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed.
Clarence Day
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Susan Sontag
All that is necessary is to accept the impossible do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.
Kathleen Norris
Never deny a diagnosis but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
Norman Cousins
Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Good enough never is has become the motto of this company.
Debbi Fields
The minute you settle for less than you deserve you get even less than you settled for.
Maureen Dowd
Acceptance says "True this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me."
Catharine Marshall
Some people confuse acceptance with apathy but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.
Arthur Gordon
Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin except to be there when he doesn't want her.
Helen Rowland
God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas but for scars.
Elbert Hubbard
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each morning sees some task begun Each evening sees it close. Something attempted something done Has earned a night's repose.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter F Drucker
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing while others judge us by what we have already done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might ' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbour you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The world is all gates all opportunities strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What one has to do usually can be done.
Eleanor Roosevelt