Quotes by American Authors - Page 52

Mistakes fail in their mission of helping the person who blames them on the other fellow.
Henry S. Haskins
Debt is a trap which man sets and baits himself and then deliberately gets into.
Josh Billings
Under normal periods any man's success hinges about 5 percent on what others do for him and 95 percent on what he does.
James A. Worsham
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
Alice Walker
One has to handle these negative experiences alone. You can't get help from your friends or family. You're finally alone with it and you have to come to grips with misfortune and go on.
Shirley Temple Black
Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
Margaret Mitchell
The amount of satisfaction you get from life depends largely on your own ingenuity self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. People who wait around for life to supply their satisfaction usually find boredom instead.
Dr. William Menninger
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy or to pursue any excessive desire diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self.
Eric Hoffer
The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
Happiness is a conscious choice not an automatic response.
Mildred Barthel
Discontent is want of self-discipline it is infirmity of will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are taught you must blame your father your sisters your brothers the school the teachers-you can blame anyone but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault because if you want to change you're the one who has got to change. It's as simple as that isn't it?
Katharine Hepburn
Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment or it will run to weeds.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.
Charles W. Eliot
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor both to yourself and to your country let men label you as they may.
Mark Twain
Be yourself and think for yourself and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
Elbert Hubbard
Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
Josiah Royce
Some leaders are born women.
Geraldine Ferraro
Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
James A. Garfield
They have rights who dare defend them.
Roger Baldwin
Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.
Herbert Otto
The proverb warns that "You should not bite that hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
Thomas Szasz
A life of reaction is a life of slavery intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action not reaction.
Rita Mae Brown
Freedom means choosing your burden.
Hephzibah Menuhin
We create our fate every day ... most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior.
Henry Miller
Each of us makes his own weather determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
Fulton J. Sheen
Choice of attention-to pay attention to this and ignore that-is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.
W.H. Auden
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
Christian Bovee
Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of.
Geri Weitzman
I truly believe that women of my generation can bring a new cleansing element to American public life.
Georgie Anne Geyer
I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime. ... I would make something happen.
Louis L'Amour
You need to claim the events in your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done which may take some time you are fierce with reality.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
Mignon McLaughlin
I woman give birth: and this time to myself.
Alma Villanueva
We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
Exude happiness and you will feel it back a thousand times.
Joan Lunden
Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment heredity and movements and changes in the world about him then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. ... Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today that I shall be tomorrow.
Louis L'Amour
Our awesome responsibility to ourselves to our children and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Every man is his own ancestor and every man his own heir. He devises his own future and he inherits his own past.
H. F. Hedge
There ain't nothing from the outside can lick any of us.
Margaret Mitchell
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Robert M. Pirsig
God why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart? Every grace I need has already been given me. Oh lead me to the Beyond within.
Macrina Wiederkehr
I've never met a person I don't care what his condition in whom I could not see possibilities. I don't care how much a man may consider himself a failure I believe in him for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life anytime he is prepared and ready to do it. Whenever he develops the desire he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.
Preston Bradley
It is what you are inside that matters. You yourself are your only real capital.
Vladimir Zworykin
There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself.
Thomas L. Masson
If you can't change your fate change your attitude.
Amy Tan
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in life has a purpose.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
My future is one I must make myself.
Louis L'Amour
The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.
Bum Phillips
When I saw something that needed doing I did it.
Nellie Cashman
The best things in life must come by effort from within not by gifts from the outside.
Fred Corson