Quotes by American Authors - Page 99

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
In combat life is short nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier he is concerned with his literal life chances.
Charles E. Moskos
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
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
Louise Nevelson
Half the unhappiness in the world is due to the failure of plans which were never reasonable and often impossible.
Edgar Watson Howe
It is impossible to control creation.
Evelyn Scott
Don't spend time beating on a wall hoping to transform it into a door.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
Louis L'Amour
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?
Henry David Thoreau
Each of us does in effect strike a series of "deals " or compromises between the wants and longings of the inner self and an outer environment that offers certain possibilities and sets certain limitations.
Maggie Scarf
The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.
Ram Dass
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nobody has things just as he would like them. The thing to do is to make a success with what material I have. It is a sheer waste of time and soul-power to imagine what I would do if things were different. They are not different.
Dr. Frank Crane
You never conquer a mountain. You stand on the summit a few moments then the wind blows your footprints away.
Arlene Blum
[Being a parent] is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love you can get a puppy.
Barbara Walters
I cannot do everything but still I can do something and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do something I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
It is enough that I am of value to somebody today.
Hugh Prather
Striving for excellence motivates you striving for perfection is demoralizing.
Dr. Harriet Braiker
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
It is only fools who keep straining at high C all their lives.
Charles Dudley Warner
I long to accomplish a great and noble task but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
Helen Keller
You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The facts of life are very stubborn things.
Cleveland Amory
Of all the young men in America only a few hundred can get into major league baseball and of these only a handful in a decade can get into the Hall of Fame. So it goes in all human activity. ... Some become multimillionaires and chairmen of the board and some of us must be content to play baseball at company picnics or manage a credit union without pay.
William Feather
Try as hard as we may for perfection the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.
Samuel McChord Crothers
Don't fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have the more we want. And for this reason we never have it all.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
In nature there are neither rewards or punishments-there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life. It is the universal predicament. It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes. Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities the strength the wisdom the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.
Charlton Ogburn
It is arrogance to expect that life will always be music.... Harmony like a following breeze at sea is the exception. In a world where most things wind up broken or lost our lot is to tack and tune.
Harvey Oxenhorn
Free man is by necessity insecure thinking man is by necessity uncertain.
Erich Fromm
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
There is no such thing as something for nothing.
Napoleon Hill
We [Americans] cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and that at the eleventh hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
Brooks Atkinson
Marriage is not just spiritual communion and passionate embraces marriage is also three meals a day sharing the workload and remembering to carry out the trash.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian.
Dennis Wholey
Life is made up of sobs sniffles and smiles with sniffles predominating.
o.henry
If you want a place in the sun you've got to put up with a few blisters.
Abigail Van Buren
When I decided to go into politics I weighed the cost: I would get criticism. But I went ahead. So when the virulent criticism came I wasn't surprised. I was better able to handle it.
Herbert Hoover
There are philosophies which are unendurable not because men are cowards but because they are men.
Ludwig Lewisohn
No one from the beginning of time has had security.
Eleanor Roosevelt