Quotes by American Authors - Page 67

Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.
Alan Watts
The idea that He would take his attention away from the universe in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds is just so unlikely I can't go along with it.
Quentin Crisp
My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
Heathen n. A beknighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
Ambrose Bierce
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen - no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A firm belief atthracts facts. They come out iv holes in the ground an' cracks in th' wall to support belief but they run away fr'm doubt.
Finley Peter Dunne
The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.
Maggie Kuhn
Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.
Robert Frost
It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
Eric Hoffer
When the man is at home his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad it is problematical and is dependent on the success of his manners.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10 000 people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
Hindsight is always zo/20.
Billy Wilder
Whatever with the past has gone the best is always yet to come.
Lucy Larcom
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred with maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust death death I am alive!
Don Marquis
Yesterday's errors let yesterday cover.
Susan Coolidge
They say you should not suffer through the past. You should be able to wear it like a loose garment take it off and let it drop.
Eva Jessye
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
John Oliver Hobbes
Should-haves solve nothing. It's the next thing to happen that needs thinking about.
Alexandra Ripley
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
Sydney J. Harris
Were it not better to forget Than to remember and regret?
L. E. Landon
Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead that is where your future lies.
Ann Landers
When one door closes another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
An indefinable something is to be done in a way nobody knows how at a time nobody knows when that will accomplish nobody knows what.
Thomas B. Read
Reform must come from within not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.
James Cardinal Gibbons
We are reformers in Spring and Summer in Autumn and Winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world but he knows he can't.
Clarence S. Darrow
Breaks balance out. The sun don't shine on the same old dog's rear end every day.
Darrell Royal
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
Bret Harte
Luck is largely a matter of paying attention.
Susan M. Dodd
I was born lucky and I have lived lucky. What I had was used. What I still have is being used. Lucky.
Katharine Hepburn
Luck is a combination of confidence and getting the breaks.
Christy Mathewson
Motivation triggers luck.
Mike Wallace
Luck is believing you're lucky.
Tennessee Williams
It's funny but... you're sort of a moving target for fortune and you never know when it will befall you.
Thomas McGuane
When something bad happens to me I think I'm able to deal with it in a pretty good way. That makes me lucky. Some people fall apart at the first little thing that happens.
Christie Brinkley
To get it right be born with luck or else make it.
Ruth Gordon
Probably any successful career has "X" number of breaks in it and maybe the difference between successful people and those who aren't superachievers is taking advantage of those breaks.
Joan Ganz Cooney
There are so many people with all kinds of lucky things happening to them and they don't know how to use it.
Rocky Aoki
Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson
If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.
Charles J. Ingersoll
When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate black sorcery stones.
Stephen Vincent Benét
The time is comin' whin not more thin hath iv us'll be rale an' th' rest'll be rubber (plastic!)
Finley Peter Dunne
We take our shape it is true within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.
James Baldwin
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
Men expect too much do too little.
Allen Tate
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
Why are we surprised when fig trees bear figs?
Margaret Titzel
Do not commit the error common among the young of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.
Jan de Hartog
Life didn't promise to be wonderful.
Teddy Pendergrass
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
Bernard M. Baruch
In spite of all of the training you get and the precautions you take to keep yourself alive it's largely a matter of luck that decides whether or not you get killed.
James Jones
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but boys it is all hell.
General William T. Sherman
I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is but it does not admit of holidays.
Abraham Lincoln
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
General William Sherman
My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.
Ellen Sue Stern
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry Kissinger