Quotes by American Authors - Page 59

Next to God we are indebted to women first for life itself and then for making it worth living.
Mary McLeod Bethune
You can enjoy encouragement coming from outside but you cannot need for it to come from outside.
Vladimir Zworykin
Confronted by an absolutely infuriating review it is sometimes helpful for the victim to do a little personal research on the critic. Is there any truth to the rumor that he had no formal education beyond the age of eleven? In any event is he able to construct a simple English sentence? Do his participles dangle? When moved to lyricism does he write "I had a fun time"? Was he ever arrested for burglary? I don't know that you will prove anything this way but it is perfectly harmless and quite soothing.
Jean Kerr
From self alone expect applause.
Marion L. Burton
She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.
Dwight L. Moody
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Audre Lorde
We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.
Ethel Barrett
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
Emily Dickinson
In my business you measure your respect by the enemies you make.
Theo E. Colborn
Cuteness in children is totally an adult perspective. The children themselves are unaware that the quality exists let alone its desirability until the reactions of grown-ups inform them.
Leontine Young
It's just like magic. When you live by yourself all your annoying habits are gone!
Merrill Markoe
The widening of woman's sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it and if the world scoff let it scoff-if it sneer let it sneer.
Lucy Stone
I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.
Beverly Sills
Let us not forget that among [women's] rights is the right to speak freely.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves to like themselves.
Bonaro Overstreet
The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.
Kay Boyle
Do not attempt to do a thing unless you are sure of yourself but do not relinquish it simply because someone else is not sure of you.
Stewart E. White
It is not easy to be a pioneer-but oh it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment even the worst moment for all the riches in the world.
Elizabeth Blackwell
Everybody wants to do something to help but nobody wants to be first.
Pearl Bailey
Cautious careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing never can bring about a reform.
Susan B. Anthony
You can succeed if nobody else believes it but you will never succeed if you don't believe in yourself.
William J. H. Boetcker
Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people.
James Russell Lowell
Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
Eric Hoffer
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself but the most inconvenient one too.
Josh Billings
A man must learn to forgive himself.
Arthur Davison Ficke
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
to be nobody but yourself- in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings
I'm a vague conjunctured personality more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.
Woodrow Wilson
I shall stay the way I am Because I do not give a damn.
Dorothy Parker
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I think Dostoevsky was right that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture where he says this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
Rollo May
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die.
Bernard Berenson
Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing or very little the shock can kill a man.
Ernest Hemingway
From without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it.
Herman Melville
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity.
Erich Fromm
Self-respect is the root of discipline: the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
Abraham J. Heschel
Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of them all.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
I am as bad as the worst but thank God I am as good as the best.
Walt Whitman
I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Be yourself. Who else is better qualified?
Frank J. Giblin
Goethe said there would be little left of him if you were to discard what he owed to others.
Charlotte Cushman
We judge ourselves by our motives and others by their actions.
Dwight Morrow
With every physical pain my moral fibre unravels a little.
Mason Cooley
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
George Santayana
Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because however successful he may be in overcoming them he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice.
W.H. Auden
Know him know me.
Dizzy Gillespie
Egotism: the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
George Higgins
A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
We hear of a silent generation more concerned with security than integrity with conforming than performing with imitating than creating.
Thomas J. Watson
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
John Steinbeck
Nerves provide me with energy. ... It's when I don't have them when I feel at ease that I get worried.
Mike Nichols
Without danger we cannot get beyond danger.... Each one of us requires the spur of insecurity to force us to do our best.
Dr. Harold W. Dodds
Security is a kind of death.
Tennessee Williams
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
Freedom works.
Jeane Kirkpatrick