Quotes by American Authors - Page 82

If you're looking for perfection look in the mirror. If you find it there expect it elsewhere.
Malcolm Forbes
Perfection is out of the question.
Anne Archer
Perfection never exists in reality but only in our dreams.
Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs
A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.
Marge Piercy
The essence of man is imperfection.
Norman Cousins
The two kinds of people on earth that I mean Are the people who lift and the people who lean.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The second sober thought of the people is seldom wrong and always efficient.
Martin Van Buren
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln
God must have loved the plain people: He made so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
If the pursuit of peace is both old and new it is also both complicated and simple. It is complicated for it has to do with people and nothing in this universe baffles man as much as man himself.
Adlai Stevenson
Peace won by compromise is usually a short-lived achievement.
Winfield Scott
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
Ulysses S. Grant
Even peace may be purchased at too high a price.
Benjamin Franklin
Today let's give thanks for life. For life itself. For simply being born!
Daphne Rose Kingma
We're all only fragile threads but what a tapestry we make.
Jerry Ellis
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
Betty Smith
What is defeat? Nothing but education nothing but the first step toward something better.
Wendell Phillips
I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.
Thomas Alva Edison
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life.
John Miller
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus only by hard work risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: yourself.
Alan Alda
Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today made by past generations was before its appearance a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in the heart of a woman.
Kahlil Gibran
Each of us makes his own weather determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
If we did all the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Alva Edison
Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Benjamin Spock
The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everyone has got it in him if he will only make up his mind and stick at it. None of us is born with a stop-valve on his powers or with a set limit to his capacities. There is no limit possible to the expansion of each one of us.
Charles Schwab
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success.
Norman Vincent Peale
You can do anything you wish to do have anything you wish to have be anything you wish to be.
Robert Collier
It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that we are never so much human as when we are striving for what is beyond our grasp and that there is no battle worth the winning save that against our own ignorance and fear.
James Ramsey Ullman
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared to believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.
Bruce Barton
Exhilaration of life can be found only with an upward look. This is an exciting world. It is cram-packed with opportunity. Great moments wait around every corner.
Richard Devos
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.
Maxwell Maltz
Stop the mindless wishing that things would be different. Rather than wasting time and emotional and spiritual energy in explaining why we don't have what we want we can start to pursue other ways to get it.
Greg Anderson
Pessimism never won any battle.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The average pencil is seven inches long with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead.
Robert Brault
Whenever something good happens write it down. Buy a special notebook . . . and use it to list all the good in your life.
Peter McWilliams
Picture yourself placing your problem inside a pale yellow balloon letting it go watching it drift until it is a tiny pastel dot in the sky.
Barbara Markoff
The quickest way to change your attitude toward pain is to accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.
M. Scott Peck
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
I'm not afraid of storms for I'm learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
Diseases can be our spiritual flat tires - disruptions in our lives that seem to be disasters at the time but end by redirecting our lives in a meaningful way.
Bernie Siegel
If you will call your troubles experiences and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you you will grow vigorous and happy however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Miller
There are two big forces at work external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes earthquakes floods disasters illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.
Leo Buscaglia
There is very little difference in people but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.
W Clement Stone
We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we take it what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end.
Joseph Newton
Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas he sees his picture mentally. ... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting what do you see? ... Is the picture one you think worth painting? . . . You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.
Thomas Dreier
We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.
Mary Dunbar
Positive thoughts (joy happiness fulfillment achievement worthiness) have positive results (enthusiasm calm well-being ease energy love). - Negative thoughts (judgment unworthiness mistrust resentment fear) produce negative results (tension anxiety alienation anger fatigue).
Peter McWilliams
Peace like charity begins at home.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
We merely want to live in peace with all the world to trade with them to commune with them to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
It takes two to make peace.
John F Kennedy
It is understanding that gives us an ability to have peace. When we understand the other fellow's viewpoint and he understands ours then we can sit down and work out our differences.
Harry S. Truman
Before it's too late and time is running out let us turn from trust in the chain reactions of exploding atoms to faith of the chain reaction of God's love. Love - love of God and fellow men. That is God's formula for peace.
Richard Cardinal Cushing
It isn't enough to talk about peace one must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it one must work at it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower