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Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

Alice Foote MacDougall

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Alice Foote MacDougall
Age: 77 †
Born: 1867
Born: March 2
Died: 1945
Died: February 10
Writer
New York City
New York
Absurd
Least
Almost
Success
Erratic
May
Depart
Come
Arrives
Thing
Expects
Whim

More quotes by Alice Foote MacDougall

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When one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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In business everyone is out to grab, to fight, to win. Either you are the under or the over dog. It is up to you to be on top.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Life is beset by many annoyances, and those that stand out above all are the life- insurance and advertising agents.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty
Alice Foote MacDougall
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a few hours with Beethoven are more restful than sleep.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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... hunger and cold, ill-health and pain are nothing. They pass. The thing that remains is ignorant criticism, well-meaning but futile advice, the contempt of a subordinate, the feelings of the underdog.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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In all the wide gamut of human experience, nothing plays so important a part as faith.... Faith that is as broad as the heavens and as wide as the earth. Faith that comprehends in its vast sympathies everything human as well as divine, and carries one with the swift sure wings of the angels directly to his goal.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Not only is orderliness an economy it produces rest.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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... overconfidence in one's own ability is the root of much evil. Vanity, egoism, is the deadliest of all characteristics. This vanity, combined with extreme ignorance of conditions the knowledge of which is the very A B C of business and of life, produces more shipwrecks and heartaches than any other part of our mental make-up.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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You realize the futility of worry. You learn to hate the small and the little. Life is a pie which you cut in large slices, not grudgingly, not sparingly. You know your limitations and proceed to eliminate them your abilities, and proceed to develop them. You are free.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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That is the wearisome part of business - there is no peace, no sense of certain, permanent achievement, no stability. The unexpected, and usually the awful, is forever happening.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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There is romance in coffee. It comes from the ends of the earth, and goes to the far corners of man's habitation.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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Really to succeed, we must give of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.
Alice Foote MacDougall