Quotes by American Authors - Page 87

All profoundly original work looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
When people are free to do as they please they usually imitate each other. Originality is deliberate and forced and partakes of the nature of a protest.
Eric Hoffer
All cases are unique and very similar to others.
T.S Eliot
What a good thing Adam had - when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Ezra Pound
We put things in order - God does the rest. Lay an iron bar east and west it is not magnetized. Lay it north and south and it is.
Horace Mann
When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
Will Durant
There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody anywhere anytime.
Calvin Coolidge
Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world gets better every day - then worse again in the evening.
Kin Hubbard
The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.
Elbert Hubbard
A pessimist is one who has been compelled to live with an optimist.
Elbert Hubbard
An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed.
Kin Hubbard
To look up and not down To look forward and not back To look out and not in and To lend a hand.
Edward Everett Hale
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
Don Marquis
Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
Benjamin Franklin
Unless a man has trained himself for his chance the chance will only make him ridiculous.
William Matthews
If you want greater prosperity in your life start forming a vacuum to receive it.
Catherine Ponder
I always keep myself in a position of being a student.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready. And few people have ever been really ready without receiving opportunity's call.
Channing Pollock
The best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.
Ruth Gordon
We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity.
Walter E. Cole
Times of stress and difficulty are seasons of opportunity when the seeds of progress are sown.
Thomas F. Woodlock
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Mark Twain
Vigilance in watching opportunity tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost possible achievement-these are the martial virtues which must command success.
Austin Phelps
The successful man is one who had the chance and took it.
Roger Babson
When one door closes another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
Helen Keller
I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks but everyone also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on.
Samuel Goldwyn
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.
Eric Hoffer
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. ... To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly is the only way to meet supreme opportunities when they come whether open-faced or disguised.
Maltbie D. Babcock
Men do with opportunities as children do at the seashore they fill their little hands with sand and then let the grains fall through one by one till all are gone.
T. Jones
Great opportunities to help others seldom come but small ones come daily.
Ivy Baker Priest
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates all opportunities strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work so most people don't recognize them.
Ann Landers
A door that seems to stand open must be a man's size or it is not the door that Providence means for him.
Henry Ward Beecher
You can't make souffle rise twice.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.
Arthur Vandenberg
Opportunity knocks at every man's door once. On some men's door it hammers till it breaks down the door and then it goes in and wakes him up if he's asleep and ever afterward it works for him as a night watchman.
Finley Peter Dunne
Our opportunities to do good are our talents.
Cotton Mather
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.
Starhawk
You decide you'll wait for your pitch. Then as the ball starts toward the plate you think about your stance. And then you think about your swing. And then you realize that the ball that went past you for a strike was your pitch.
Bobby Murcer
The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line? Will it be everything you dreamed of? We seal our fate with the choices we take but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.
Gloria Estefan
He that waits upon fortune is never sure of a dinner.
Benjamin Franklin
You don't just luck into things ... you build step by step whether it's friendships or opportunities.
Barbara Bush
Life is what we make it always has been always will be.
Grandma Moses
Life is a narrative that you have a hand in writing.
Henriette Anne Klauser
If you want to succeed in the world you must make your own opportunities.
John B. Gough
You create your opportunities by asking for them.
Patty Hansen
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
James Russell Lowell
Public opinion though often formed upon a wrong basis yet generally has a strong underlying sense of justice.
Abraham Lincoln
It is rare that the public sentiment decides immorally or unwisely and the individual who differs from it ought to distrust and examine well his own opinion.
Thomas Jefferson
Too often we . . . enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F Kennedy
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
James Russell Lowell
A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
Will Rogers
The world is not run by thought nor by imagination but by opinion.
Elizabeth Drew
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert Humphrey