quotes on determination and perseverance

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. ~Frederick Douglass, escaped slave



Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word. ~Gail Hamilton



Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living. ~Tom O'Connor



It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk. ~Henry Ward Beecher



Quotable: suitable for or worthy of quoting.



...when deep-space exploitation ramps up, it will probably be the megatonic corporations that discover all the new planets and map them. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Denny's. Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first. Budweiser World. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 23



All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance. ~Theodore M. Hesburgh



Don't laugh at the coffee. Some day you, too, may be old and weak. ~Author Unknown



Humor is just another defense against the universe. ~Mel Brooks



I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. ~Mae West



Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat - at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales. ~Mark Twain



The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. ~H.L. Mencken



The best time to make friends is before you need them. ~Ethel Barrymore



I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it. ~Wilson Mizner



The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age. ~Lucille Ball



Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools. ~Albert Einstein



Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. ~Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter



In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com



Hope deceives more men than cunning does. ~Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, 1746



When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967