Quotable Quotes

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Profiles of the Future

  I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

  —WERNHER VON BRAUN

  What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.

  —THEODORE ROETHKE

  The difference between the impossible and the possible lies

  in a person’s determination.

  —TOMMY LASORDA

  The impossible is often the untried.

  —JIM GOODWIN

  All things are possible until they are proved impossible—and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

  —PEARL S. BUCK

  A Bridge for Passing

  Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.

  —NORMAN COUSINS

  Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

  —ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

  Everything looks impossible for the people who never try anything.

  —JEAN-LOUIS ETIENNE

  The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.

  —PEARL S. BUCK

  Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.

  —CHARLES F. KETTERING

  Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.

  —DOUG LARSON

  IF YOU WANT A PLACE IN THE SUN . . .

  If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.

  —ABIGAIL VAN BUREN

  Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Probably the most honest “self-made man” ever was the one we heard say: “I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.”

  —JAMES THOM

  You can’t expect to make a place in the sun for yourself if you keep taking refuge under the family tree.

  —CLAUDE MCDONALD

  in The Christian Word

  The important thing in life is not to have a good hand but to play it well.

  —LOUIS-N. FORTIN

  Pensées, Proverbes, Maximes

  Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.

  —DAVID BLY

  in Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

  Showing up is 80 percent of life.

  —WOODY ALLEN

  If you play to win, as I do, the game never ends.

  —STAN MIKITA

  Journal (Edmonton, Alberta)

  There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.

  —GEN. COLIN L. POWELL

  in The Black Collegian

  Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

  —GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON

  Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.

  —AL BERNSTEIN

  Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

  —PETER DRUCKER

  Success is often just an idea away.

  —FRANK TYGER

  The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen.

  —SARAH BROWN

  Success has a simple formula: do your best, and people may like it.

  —SAM EWING

  As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

  —BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  You’re never a loser until you quit trying.

  —MIKE DITKA

  There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you about it?

  —KIN HUBBARD

  Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

  —AN WANG

  Lessons: An Autobiography

  Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.

  —DAVID FROST

  Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.

  —ARNOLD H. GLASOW

  Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.

  —JOE PATERNO

  Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.

  —GEORGE F. WILL

  Always do what you say you are going to do. It is the glue and fiber that binds successful relationships.

  —JEFFRY A. TIMMONS

  The Entrepreneurial Mind

  A FINE LANDSCAPE IS LIKE A PIECE OF MUSIC . . .

  There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine land­scape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast.

  —PAUL SCOTT MOWRER

  The House of Europe

  When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

  —JOHN MUIR

  The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

  —CARL SAGAN

  Our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them unless we were meant to be immortal.

  —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like falling leaves.

  —JOHN MUIR

  There is no silence like that of the mountains.

  —GUY BUTLER

  A Local Habitation

  I have seen the sea when it is stormy and wild; when it is quiet and serene; when it is dark and moody. And in all its moods, I see myself.

  —MARTIN BUXBAUM

  April hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.

  —MARTIN LUTHER

  Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees / Rock’d in the cradle of the western breeze.

  —WILLIAM COWPER

  Spring, thy name is color.

  —LIBBIE FUDIM

  Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party!”

  —ROBIN WILLIAMS

  A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the king.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn.

  —Quoted by LEWIS GRIZZARD in Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You

  The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.

  —HENRY VAN DYKE

  Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.

  —DOUG LARSON

  Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

  —HENRY JAMES

  If a June night could talk, it would probably boast that it invented romance.

  —BERN WILLIAMS

  Until you have heard the whippoorwill, either nearby or in the faint distance, you have not experienced summer night.

  —HENRY B
EETLE HOUGH

  in Vineyard Gazette (Edgartown, Massachusetts)

  Oh, the summer night has a smile of light, and she sits on a sapphire throne.

  —B. W. PROCTER

  The experience of drought and dust storms remains central to the psychology of the prairie west; more than the intermittent affluence of postwar decades, it tints a westerner’s outlook on life. He continues to live in next year country, where he smokes a pack of hope a day.

  —MARK ABLEY

  Beyond Forget

  For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.

  —EDWIN WAY TEALE

  Autumn Across America

  Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  Autumn carries more gold in its hand than all the other seasons.

  —JIM BISHOP

  October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.

  —NOVA S. BAIR

  in Capper’s Weekly

  October, here’s to you. Here’s to the heady aroma of the frost-kissed apples, the winey smell of ripened grapes, the wild-as-the-wind smell of hickory nuts and the nostalgic whiff of that first wood smoke.

  —KEN WEBER

  in Providence, R.I., Journal-Bulletin

  Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring.

  —DOUG LARSON

  Winter is not a season; it’s an occupation.

  —SINCLAIR LEWIS

  Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.

  —BERN WILLIAMS

  in The National Enquirer

  No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

  —HAL BORLAND

  Sundial of the Seasons

  All sunshine makes a desert.

  —ARABIC PROVERB

  I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.

  —ADELINE KNAPP

  When there is a river in your growing up, you probably always hear it.

  —ANN ZWINGER

  Run, River, Run

  I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

  —WILLA CATHER

  A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

  —D. ELTON TRUEBLOOD

  I never knew how soothing trees are—many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.

  —RABINDRANATH TAGORE

  Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

  A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire; but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.

  —HAL BORLAND

  Sundial of the Seasons

  He that plants trees loves others besides himself.

  —ENGLISH PROVERB

  Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.

  —LUTHER BURBANK

  If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

  —GEORGE ELIOT

  People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

  —IRIS MURDOCH

  A Fairly Honourable Defeat

  The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE

  D. H. Lawrence and Italy

  I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

  Bring Me a Unicorn

  I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

  —PETE HAMILL

  in Esquire

  A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

  —MONTAIGNE

  I’ve always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

  —ALAN HOVHANESS

  The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

  —GEORGE SANTAYANA

  The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence. It may be a theatrical “encore.”

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  Everybody wants to go back to nature—but not on foot.

  —WERNER MITSCH

  Never a daisy grows but a mystery guides the growing.

  —RICHARD REALF

  I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

  —HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK

  If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.

  —EMERSON M. PUGH

  Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is the explanation for the miracle of existence—why there is something instead of nothing.

  —COSMOLOGIST ALLAN R. SANDAGE

  Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain.

  —IHAB HASSAN

  The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

  —EDEN PHILLPOTTS

  A Shadow Passes

  The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

  —GALILEO

  To define the universe would be to contain it, and that would be to limit existence.

  —DAVID BERESFORD

  in The Weekly Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg, South Africa)

  The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind—a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.

  —WOODY ALLEN

  LEAVE A LANDSCAPE AS IT WAS . . .

  There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

  —ROBERT LYND

  The Blue Lion and Other Essays

  Don’t blow it—good planets are hard to find.

  —Quoted in Time

  What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet t
o put it on?

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

  —ANSEL ADAMS

  Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

  —EDWARD ABBEY

  Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long.

  —OGDEN NASH

  Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.

  —THOR HEYERDAHL

  Fatu-Hiva

  You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.

  —FRANK DEFORD

  in Sports Illustrated

  Since the beginning each generation has fought nature. Now, in the life-span of a single generation, we must turn around 180 degrees and become the protector of nature.

  —JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU

  We haven’t got too much time left to ensure that government of the earth, by the earth, for the earth, shall not perish from the people.