All quotes

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.

The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who is braced to effort neither in the office nor out of it

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 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.

Failure in any good cause is, however, honourable, whilst success in any bad cause is merely infamous.

In the pursuit of even the highest branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most useful

Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.