Sj Lewis > Sj's Quotes

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
― John Wooden

“What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.”
― Martha Graham

“With time and perspective we recognize that such problems in life do come for a purpose, if only to allow the one who faces such despair to be convinced that he really does need divine strength beyond himself, that she really does need the offer of heaven’s hand. Those who feel no need for mercy usually never seek it and almost never bestow it. Those who have never had a heartache or a weakness or felt lonely or forsaken never have had to cry unto heaven for relief of such personal pain. Surely it is better to find the goodness of God and the grace of Christ, even at the price of despair, than to risk living our lives in a moral or material complacency that has never felt any need for faith or forgiveness, any need for redemption or relief.”
― Jeffery R. Holland

“If we are always arriving and departing, it is also
true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination
is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

“Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.”
― Alice Hoffman, Local Girls

“Life isn't a straightforward climb up the ladder. It can take a few slips to really gain perspective.”
― Kate Jacobs

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius , Meditations

“The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.”
― Sara Paretsky, Bleeding Kansas

“Distance lends enchantment to the view.”
― Mark Twain

“A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.”
― Howard Fast, April Morning

“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”
― Martin Tupper

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
― Herbert Bayard Swope

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
― J.K. Rowling

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”
― Lance Armstrong Sally Jenkins, Every Second Counts

“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”
― Oriah Mountain Dreamer

“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.”
― Salvador Dali

“The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.”
― Julia Child

“So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”
― Tom Robbins

“I feel to invite women everywhere to rise to the great potential within you. I do not ask that you reach beyond your capacity. I hope you will not nag yourselves with thoughts of failure. I hope you will not try to set goals far beyond your capacity to achieve. I hope you will simply do what you can do in the best way you know. If you do so, you will witness miracles come to pass.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism