The quote database

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed

The Negro boy has obstacles, discouragements, and temptations to battle with that are little known to those not situated as he is.

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

I will not say that I became discouraged, for as I now look back over my life I do not recall that I ever became discouraged over anything that I set out to accomplish.

The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat.

Competence to age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had.

Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

You hang around a barbershop long enough—sooner or later you will get a haircut.

I walked out of there to prepare for the next audition, and the next audition, and the next one.

Those that have joined with their honor great travels, cares, or perils, are less subject to envy.

Their life seems an immense disparity between effort and opportunity.

My share in the work of the world may be limited; but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

In spite of failures, cooperative schemes went on, some of the same men appearing in one after another with irrepressible optimism.

Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

She is besotted with innocent little ambitions, and does not understand this apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for her.

Life is a verb. We try our best. We don’t always do our best.

Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

I know that peace does not come through wishing for it--that there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy.

A hopeless feeling descends on one and is hard to fight off.

Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow.

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

One can only say 'God help us!' and plod on our weary way, cold and very miserable, though outwardly cheerful.