c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The same is true of stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But [the extermination of proper place names] (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order.' The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all...There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
— Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented.
— Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.
— Kate Christensen, The Astral
When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he [sic] will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
We could already try to lend a hand, to intervene if only by simply moving objects around. This would be better, on the whole, than waiting for the thick wall encircling life to brutally make the first move. (As happens during wartime.)
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.
— Ross Macdonald
The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?
— Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.
— Steven Magee
Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world -- is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love -- passion -- liberty.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,–the city is a garment stretched so thinher festive colors bleed into the night.
— Michael Burch
Byproduct of the circulation of commodities, human circulation considered as a form of consumption, tourism comes down fundamentally to the freedom to go and see what has become banal. The economic planning of the frequenting of different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that has withdrawn the element of time from journeying, has also withdrawn the reality of space.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Moreover the present abundance3 of private cars is nothing other than the result of the non-stop propaganda through which capitalist production persuades the mob--and in this case is one of its most confounding successes--that the possession of a car is specifically one of the privileges our society reserves for its privileged members.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
So many problems we will get to the bottom of later, but whose spatial aspect we must grasp right away. If the space of the industrial economy dominates the social space in which the Parisian worker or intellectual develops, to what extent could residential space, cultural space, or political space be planned without it being necessary to first intervene in economic structures?...In short...: to what extent can we freely build the framework for a social life in which we might be guided by our aspirations and not by our instincts?
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Because of this false idea, they devised an aesthetic belief in making the exterior of an object a reflection of the practical functions of the interior and of the constructive idea. Yet these analyses of utility and necessity that, according to their beliefs, should be the basis for the construction of any object created by humanity become immediately absurd once we analyze all the object being manufactured today. A fork or a bed cannot come to be considered necessary for humanity's life and health, and yet retain a relative value.They are 'learned necessities.' Modern human beings are suffocating under necessities like televisions, refrigerators, etc. And in the process making it impossible to live their real lives. Obviously we are not against modern technology, but we are against any notion of the absolute necessity of objects, to the point even of doubting their real utility.'Asger Jorn
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.
— Henry James, The Jolly Corner
The city's all brightnessand shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air-there's no help anywhere-you no longer know how to listen.
— Ralph Angel
...the assessment of psychological drift, that is the way in which an undirected pedestrian tends to move about in a particular quarter of the town, tending to establish natural connections between places, the zones of influence of particular institutions and public services, and so forth. It may well be objected that these techniques are un-scientific, disorderly and too subjective, but the fact remains that the Situationists are studying the actual texture of towns and their relationship to human beings more intensively than most architects and in a more down-to-pavement manner than most town planners.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
8. Conditions of DialogueThe functional is what is practical. The only practical thing is the resolution of our fundamental problem: the realization of ourselves (our uncoupling from the system of isolation). This is useful and utilitarian. Nothing else. All the rest represents only trivial derivations of the practical, and its mystification.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
We are leading as thorough a study of 'alienation's positive pole' as of its negative pole. As a consequence of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are able to establish the world map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These speaking maps of a new topography will be in fact the first realization of 'human geography.' On them we will replace oil-deposits with the contours of layers of untapped pedestrian consciousness.
— Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader
Although the world is full of suffering  it is full also of the overcoming of it.
— Helen Keller
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
— Edmund Burke
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes  which can be made  in a very narrow field.
— Niels Bohr
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.
— Werner Heisenberg
Faith moves mountains  but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.
— Mason Cooley
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares  when working to another aim.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing is too small to know  and nothing too big to attempt.
— William Van Horne
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor  magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned  but give him a little metal  a few chemicals  some wire and 20 or 30 billion dollars and  vroom! There he is  up on a rock  a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
— Russell Baker
The best is the enemy of the good.
— Voltaire
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves.
— Elaine Morgan
There are no credentials. They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth -just to prove they are first of the litter. You would not choose a Spaniel on these principles. (On aristocracy)
— David Lloyd George
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All men have claims on man  and to the man with special talents  this is a very special claim. It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
I am surprised nothing has been made of the fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong carried no sidearms when he landed on the moon.
— Justice Arthur Goldberg
'What would you call the highest happiness?' Wratislaw was asked. 'The sense of competence ' was the answer  given without hesitation.
— John Buchan
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
— Edward Gibbon
How many 'coming men' has one known? Where on earth do they all go to?
— Arthur Wing Pinero
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind  and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
— Henry David Thoreau
They are able who think they are able.
— Virgil
The biggest things are always the easiest to do because there is no competition.
— William Van Home
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are: and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.
— H. P. Liddon
It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.
— Kin Hubbard
Nothing great is created suddenly  any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig  I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom  then bear fruit  then ripen.
— Epictetus
Out of the strain of the Doing  Into the peace of the Done.
— Julia Louise Woodruff
It's them that takes advantage that gets advantage i' this world.
— George Eliot
I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can do.
— Lucille Ball
There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.
— Thomas Carlyle
It's the whole  not the detail  that matters.
— German proverb
Long is the road from conception to completion.
— Moliere
Back of every achievement is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.
— Brooks Hays
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
— Mark Twain
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing  while others judge us by what we have already done.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Do what you can  with what you have  where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
About all some men accomplish in life is to send a son to Harvard.
— Edgar Watson Howe
Give me where to stand  and I will move the earth.
— Archimedes
The only way round is through.
— Robert Frost
If a man does not keep pace with his companions  perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears  however measured or far away.
— Henry David Thoreau
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
— Robert Louis Stevenson
I'm a slow walker  but I never walk back.
— Abraham Lincoln
That's one small step for a man  one giant leap for mankind.
— Neil Armstrong
You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.
— William Henry Hudson
In esse I am nothing  in posse I am everything.
— John Adams
Out of the best and most productive years of each man's life  he should carve a segment in which he puts his private career aside to serve his community and his country  and thereby serve his children  his neighbours  his fellow men  and the cause of freedom.
— David Lilienthal
Good is not good  where better is expected.
— Thomas Fuller
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step  only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.
— Dag Hammarskjold
We promise according to our hopes  and perform according to our fears.
— La Rochefoucauld
Practice yourself  for heaven's sake  in little things  and thence proceed to greater.
— Epictetus
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
— Goethe
He that leaveth nothing to Chance will do few things ill  but he will do very few things.
— George, Lord Halifax
When spider webs unite  they can tie up a lion.
— Ethiopian proverb
Everyone must row with the oars he has.
— English proverb
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Any jackass can kick down a barn  but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
— Sam Rayburn
God gives the nuts  but he does not crack them.
— German proverb
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
— Louis Pasteur
The world is all gates  all opportunities  strings of tension waiting to be struck.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility  I think 'whatsoever thy hand findeth to do  do it with thy might ' infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbour as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus  you must not be thinking about yourself  and equally  you must not be thinking about your neighbour  you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do  than what one can do.
— Lin Yutang
To achieve great things  we must live as though we were never going to die.
— Vauvenargues
I am easily satisfied with the very best.
— Winston Churchill
The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces  the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.
— Bertrand Russell
Each morning sees some task begun Each evening sees it close. Something attempted  something done  Has earned a night's repose.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The reward of a thing well done  is to have done it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
God will not look you over for medals  degrees or diplomas  but for scars.
— Elbert Hubbard
There are two kinds of people: those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievements from the second.
— Louis Dudek
Behind an able man there are always other able men.
— Chinese proverb
As we advance in life  we learn the limits of our abilities.
— James Froude
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
— Napoleon
They are able because they think they are able.
— Virgil
Greater things are believed of those who are absent.
— Tacitus
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
— Ouida
Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin  except to be there when he doesn't want her.
— Helen Rowland
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.
— La Rochefoucauld
It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.
— Colette
Sometimes  when one person is missing  the whole world seems depopulated.
— Alphonse de Lamartine
The absent are always wrong.
— English proverb
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
— Thomas Haynes Bayly
Absent in body  but present in spirit.
— Bible
Achilles absent  was Achilles still.
— Homer
Let no one be willing to speak ill of the absent.
— Propertius
Some people confuse acceptance with apathy  but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped  acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action  acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.
— Arthur Gordon
Acceptance says  "True  this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me."
— Catharine Marshall
It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
— Simone de Beauvoir
The minute you settle for less than you deserve  you get even less than you settled for.
— Maureen Dowd
"Good enough never is" has become the motto of this company.
— Debbi Fields
God  grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change  the courage to change the things I can  and the wisdom to know the difference.
— Reinhold Niebuhr
We must accept finite disappointment  but we must never lose infinite hope.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Acceptance is not submission  it is acknowledgement of the facts of a situation. Then deciding what you're going to do about it.
— Kathleen Casey Theisen
Self-complacency is fatal to progress.
— Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
You have to take it as it happens  but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.
— Old German proverb
Never deny a diagnosis  but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
— Norman Cousins
All that is necessary is to accept the impossible  do without the indispensable  and bear the intolerable.
— Kathleen Norris
The happy and efficient people in this world are those who accept trouble as a normal detail of human life and resolve to capitalize it when it comes along.
— H. Bertram Lewis
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural  death is the obscene mystery  the ultimate affront  the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
— Susan Sontag
Who except the gods can live without any pain?
— Aeschylus
Misfortune comes to all men.
— Chinese proverb
The real world is not easy to live in. It is rough  it is slippery. Without the most clear-eyed adjustments we fall and get crushed.
— Clarence Day
Life has no smooth road for any of us  and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps 'til the legend  "over steep ways to the stars " fulfills self.
— W. C. Doane
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.
— Joshua L. Liebman
Yet man is born unto trouble  as the sparks fly upward.
— Bible
Into each life some rain must fall  some days must be dark and dreary.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is no man in this world without some manner of tribulation or anguish  though he be king or pope.
— Thomas a Kempis
There is no armor against fate  death lays his icy hands on kings.
— James Shirley
There is no easy path leading out of life  and few are the easy ones that lie within it.
— Walter Savage Landor
A man shares his days with hunger  thirst  and cold  with the good times and the bad  and the first part of being a man is to understand that.
— Louis L'Amour
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
One cannot get through life without pain. ... What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.
— Bernie S. Siegel
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
— Henry David Thoreau
If you have arthritis  calmly say  I was always complaining about the ruts in the road until I realized that the ruts are the road.
— Anonymous
"Okay  I have arthritis  and this is the way arthritis is." Take pain as it comes and you can better master it.
— Charles Clifford Peale
It is right it should be so  Man was made for joy and woe  And when this we rightly know  Through the world we safely go.
— William Blake
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way  but must accept his lot calmly  even if they roll a few more upon it.
— Albert Schweitzer
Free man is by necessity insecure  thinking man by necessity uncertain.
— Erich Fromm
You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it  and that is the grave.
— Henry Ward Beecher
Against necessity  against its strength  no one can fight and win.
— Aeschylus
A wise man never refuses anything to necessity.
— Publilius Syrus
When necessity speaks  it demands.
— Russian proverb
How base a thing it is when a man will struggle with necessity! We have to die.
— Euripides
Whatever is-is best.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Anything in life that we don't accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it.
— Shakti Gawain
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world  the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
— George Bernard Shaw
Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth  left to itself  it sweeps in like the tide.
— Fay Weldon
We win half the battle when we make up our minds to take the world as we find it  including the thorns.
— Orison Swett Marden
A man must live in the world and make the best of it  such as it is.
— Michel de Montaigne
There are some people that you cannot change  you must either swallow them whole or leave them alone.
— Margot Asquith
The world is not to be put in order  the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
— Henry Miller
God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how.
— Henry Ward Beecher
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
— George Santayana
No man can have society upon his own terms.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is  who find the least fault.
— Charles Dudley Warner
If you bear the cross unwillingly  you make it a burden  and load yourself more heavily  but you must bear it.
— Thomas a Kempis
There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties  or you alter yourself to meet them.
— Phyllis Bottome
I find that it is not the circumstances in which we are placed  but the spirit in which we face them  that constitutes our comfort.
— Elizabeth T. King
It is almost more important how a person takes his fate than what it is.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt
The individual who is best prepared for any occupation is the one ... able to adapt himself to any situation.
— Mortimer Smith
To act with common sense  according to the moment  is the best wisdom  and the best philosophy is to do one's duties  to take the world as it comes  submit respectfully to one's lot  and bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it  whatever it is.
— Horace Walpole
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
— Okakura Kakuzo
To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.
— Henri Frederic Amiel
Ask not that events should happen as you will  but let your will be that events should happen as they do  and you shall have peace.
— Epictetus
The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature  but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation  the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable  to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
— Dave E. Smalley
The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace  making the best of circumstances.
— Aristotle
He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper  but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.
— David Hume
Life is 10 percent what you make it  and 90 percent how you take it.
— Irving Berlin
A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.
— Louis L'Amour
Vex not thy spirit at the course of things  they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.
— Marcus Aurelius
If you can't fight  and you can't flee  flow.
— Robert Eliot
Today I know that I cannot control the ocean tides. I can only go with the flow.... When I struggle and try to organize the Atlantic to my specifications  I sink. If I flail and thrash and growl and grumble  I go under. But if I let go and float  I am borne aloft.
— Marie Stilkind
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
— Louis L'Amour
She had believed the land was her enemy  and she struggled against it  but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it  to belong to it  to fit into its seasons and its ways.
— Louis L'Amour
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
— Chuang-tzu
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away  it is best to let him run.
— Abraham Lincoln
Learn to drink the cup of life as it comes.
— Agnes Turnbull
Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery.
— Katherine Mansfield
You can't fight the desert... you have to ride with it.
— Louis L'Amour
All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.
— James A. Michener
Don't be sad  don't be angry  if life deceives you! Submit to your grief  your time for joy will come  believe me.
— Aleksandr Pushkin
When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through  it is best to meet it with firmness  and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable. This lessens the evil  while fretting and fuming only increase your own torments.
— Thomas Jefferson
Always fall in with what you're asked to accept.... My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.
— Robert Frost
There is no quality of human nature so nearly royal as the ability to yield gracefully.
— Charles Conrad
The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost look as much like home as we can.
— Christopher Fry
Make a virtue of necessity.
— Geoffrey Chaucer
Cooperation is doing with a smile what you have to do anyhow.
— Anonymous
We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.
— Alexander Hamilton
For so must it be  and help me do my part.
— Anonymous
There are no conditions to which a man cannot become accustomed.
— Leo Tolstoy
A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.
— Eleanor R. Belmont
Man adapts himself to everything  to the best and the worst.
— Jose Ortega y Gasset
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
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome  stubbornness is stupid.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight  and with which he did not always willingly cooperate  and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.
— Samuel Johnson
To exist is to adapt  and if one could not adapt  one died and made room for those who could.
— Louis L'Amour
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
— Johann von Goethe
Real life is  to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
— Bertrand Russell
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
— Samuel Butler
He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.
— Terence
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
— Friedrich Holderlin
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
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
— Roger de Rabutin
Better is the enemy of the good.
— Voltaire
If you aspire to the highest place  it is no disgrace to stop at the second  or even the third  place.
— Cicero
Genius does what it must  talent does what it can.
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Results are what you expect  consequences are what you get.
— Anonymous
To expect life to be tailored to our specifications is to invite frustration.
— Anonymous
The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.
— Ram Dass
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
— Jean Nicholas Grou
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
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps  for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
— William Hazlitt
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction  perhaps illusory  that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved  but only outgrown.
— Carl Jung
We do not write as we want  but as we can.
— W Somerset Maugham
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
— Bernard M. Baruch
A body shouldn't heed what might be. He's got to do with what is.
— Louis L'Amour
The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambitions.
— Vauvenargues
We may fail of our happiness  strive we ever so bravely  but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgment our chances and our capabilities.
— Agnes Repplier
I One of the signs of maturity is a healthy respect for reality-a respect that manifests itself in the level of one's aspirations and in the accuracy of one's assessment of the difficulties which separate the facts of today from the bright hopes of tomorrow.
— Robert H. Davies
Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small  your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.
— Dag Hammarskjold
Nothing you write  if you hope to be any good  will ever come out as you first hoped.
— Lillian Hellman
Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
— Dr. Edward De Bono
Anxiety is that range of distress which attends willing what cannot be willed.
— Leslie H. Farber
There is a mortal breed most full of futility. In contempt of what is at hand  they strain into the future  hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.
— Pindar
A life of frustration is inevitable for any coach whose man enjoyment is winning.
— Chuck Noll
No traveler e'er reached that blest abode who found not thorns and briers in his road.
— William Cowper
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
— Will Durant
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
— Charles Sanders Peirce
A hero is a man who does what he can.
— Romain Rolland
Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
— Alan Watts
The point... is to dwell upon the brightest parts in every prospect  to call off the thoughts when turning upon disagreeable objects  and strive to be pleased with the present circumstances.
— Abraham Tucker
Everything has its wonders  even darkness and silence  and I learn  whatever state I may be in  therein to be content.
— Helen Keller
Life is not always what one wants it to be  but to make the best of it  as it is  is the only way of being happy.
— Jennie Jerome Churchill
The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.
— Winston Churchill
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
— Sara Teasdale
We cannot conquer fate and necessity  yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.
— Walter Savage Landor
The idea came to me that I was  am  and will be  but perhaps will not become. This did not scare me. There was for me in being an intensity I did not feel in becoming.
— Nina Berberova
Here is a rule to remember when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not  "This is a misfortune " but "To bear this worthily is good fortune."
— Marcus Aurelius
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
— James Russell Lowell
Trouble will come soon enough  and when he does come receive him as pleasantly as possible ... the more amiably you greet him  the sooner he will go away.
— Artemus Ward
Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
— Marcus Aurelius
When we accept tough jobs as a challenge to our ability and wade into them with joy and enthusiasm  miracles can happen.
— Arland Gilbert
Love only what befalls you and is spun for you by fate.
— Marcus Aurelius
What you can't get out of  get into wholeheartedly.
— Mignon McLaughlin
Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands.
— Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Ride the horse in the direction that it's going.
— Werner Erhard
If one has to submit  it is wasteful not to do so with the best grace possible.
— Winston Churchill
Since God has been pleased to give us the Papacy  let us enjoy it.
— Pope Leo X
It is no use to grumble and complain  It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice  When God sorts out the weather and sends rain-Why  rain's my choice.
— James Whitcomb Riley
When a dog runs at you  whistle for him.
— Henry David Thoreau
An oak and a reed were arguing about their strength. When a strong wind came up  the reed avoided being uprooted by bending and leaning with the gusts of wind. But the oak stood firm and was torn up by the roots.
— Aesop
The grass must bend when the wind blows across it.
— Confucius
He who attempts to resist the wave is swept away  but he who bends before it abides.
— Bible
Adapt or perish  now as ever  is nature's inexorable imperative.
— H. G. Wells
One does not have to stand again the gale. One yields and becomes part of the wind.
— Emmanuel
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes  by making them the fruit of his character.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Better bend than break.
— Scottish proverb
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence  to be always calm ... to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.
— Cyril Connolly
There is only one way to happiness  and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
— Epictetus
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.
— Flannery O'Connor
Happiness ... can exist only in acceptance.
— Denis De Rougemont
Happiness comes from within a man  from some curious adjustment to life.
— Hugh Walpole
Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change!
— J. C. F. von Schiller
Contentment  and indeed usefulness  comes as the infallible result of great acceptances  great humilities-of not trying to conform to some dramatized version of ourselves.
— David Grayson
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither  but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
— Thornton Wilder
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest  but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
— T. S. Eliot
I accept life unconditionally. ... Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.
— Arthur Rubinstein
Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
— Werner Erhard
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything  one's last is to come to terms with everything.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
If you are wise  live as you can  if you cannot  live as you would.
— Baltasar Gracian
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
— Olive Schreiner
For this is wisdom: to live  to take what fate  or the Gods  may give.
— Laurence Hope
Acceptance and Work If you have a job without aggravations  you don't have a job.
— Malcolm Forbes
When I decided to go into politics I weighed the costs. I would get criticism. But I went ahead. So when virulent criticism came I wasn't surprised. I was better able to handle it.
— Herbert Hoover
Every job has drudgery. ... The first secret of happiness is the recognition of this fundamental fact.
— M. C. Mcintosh
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible  but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
— Vincent van Gogh
He who doesn't accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
— Charles Baudelaire
Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward  as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.
— Michel de Montaigne
The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another  not because he does not feel them  but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
— Aristotle
The great soul surrenders itself to fate.
— Marcus Annaeus Seneca
The mind which renounces  once and forever  a futile hope  has its compensations in ever-growing calm.
— George R. Gissing
I not only bow to the inevitable  I am fortified by it.
— Thornton Wilder
I have accepted all and I am free. The inner chains are broken  as well as those outside.
— C. F. Ramuz
The most beautiful thing is inevitability of events  and the most ugly thing is trying to resist inevitability.
— Katharine Butler Hathaway
Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
— Lin Yutang
If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles  we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.
— Hazel Henderson
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
— Carl Jung
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.
— William James
Almost any event will put on a new face when received with cheerful acceptance.
— Henry S. Haskins
What it is forbidden to be put right becomes lighter by acceptance.
— Horace
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
— Andre Gide
If you cast away one cross  you will certainly find another  and perhaps a heavier.
— Thomas a Kempis
Science says: "We must live " and seeks the means of prolonging  increasing  facilitating and amplifying life  of making it tolerable and acceptable  wisdom says: "We must die " and seeks how to make us die well.
— Miguel de Unamuno
True freedom lies in the realization and calm acceptance of the fact that there may very well be no perfect answer.
— Allen Reid McGinnis
As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone  So to yield with life solves the insolvable: To yield  I have learned  is to come back again.
— Lao-Tzu
Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.
— Anonymous
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. ... I can find no serenity until I accept that person  place  thing  or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
— Alcoholics Anonymous
Resistance causes pain and lethargy. It is when we practice acceptance that new possibilities appear.
— Anonymous
To oppose something is to maintain it.
— Ursula K. LeGuin
No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
— Ellen Glasgow
Often the prudent  far from making their destinies  succumb to them.
— Voltaire
Things past redress are now with me past care.
— William Shakespeare
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
— Louise Nevelson
He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.
— Boethius
No rose without a thorn.
— French proverb
Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.
— Dr. Alexis Carrel
If you want a place in the sun  you've got to put up with a few blisters.
— Abigail Van Buren
Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.
— Plutarch
Nature  to be commanded  must be obeyed.
— Francis Bacon
The first step toward change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself  you open the door to change. That's all you have to do. Change is not something you do  it's something you allow.
— Will Garcia
Keep doing what you're doing and you'll keep getting what you're getting.
— Anonymous
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate  it oppresses.
— Carl Jung
When you make your peace with authority  you become authority.
— Jim Morrison
Ours must be the first age whose great goal  on a nonmaterial plane  is not fulfillment but adjustment.
— Louis Kronenberger
Woman must not accept  she must challenge.
— Margaret Sanger
We have fought this fight as long  and as well  as we know how. We have been defeated. There is now but one course to pursue. We must accept the situation.
— Robert E. Lee
Competition is about passion for perfection  and passion for other people who join in this impossible quest.
— Mariah Burton Nelson
Better to accept whatever happens.
— Horace
If we cannot do what we will  we must will what we can.
— Yiddish proverb
Every man must be content with that glory which he may have at home.
— Boethius
Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
— Eric Hoffer
What cannot be avoided  t'were childish weakness to lament or fear.
— William Shakespeare
I will not meddle with that which I cannot mend.
— Thomas Fuller
I have learned to live with it all... whatever happens ... all of it.
— Edelgard
There is no such thing as pure pleasure  some anxiety always goes with it.
— Ovid
If a ship has been sunk  I can't bring it up. If it is going to be sunk  I can't stop it. I can use my time much better working on tomorrow's problem than by fretting about yesterday's. Besides  if I let those things get me  I wouldn't last long.
— Admiral Ernest J. King
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
— Oscar Wilde
Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles  but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.
— Norman Vincent Peale
A flower falls even though we love it. A weed grows even though we don't love it.
— Dogen
Acceptance says  True  this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblink-ingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me.
— Catharine Marshall
Man is a pliant animal  a being who gets accustomed to anything.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams  illusions  wars  peace  love  hate  all that. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it's unknown  and it's plain sailing.
— John Lennon
Happiness is experienced when your life gives you what you are willing to accept.
— Ken Keyes
Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.
— G. K. Chesterton
What must be shall be  and that which is a necessity to him that struggles  is little more than choice to him that is willing.
— Marcus Annaeus Seneca
Acceptance makes any event put on a new face.
— Henry S. Haskins
There is no sense in the struggle  but there is no choice but to struggle.
— Ernie Pyle