Quote

To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Foote MacDougall
Age: 77 †
Born: 1867
Born: March 2
Died: 1945
Died: February 10
Writer
New York City
New York
Life
Free
Means
Given
Latitude
Soul
Imposed
Feel
Merely
Feels
Duty
Mean
Growing
Much
Upon

More quotes by Alice Foote MacDougall

Image
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
Image
... the deep experience of the lonely climb on the mountain of success brings a wealth beyond power to compute. To you all suffering is understandable and your heart opens wide in sympathy.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
Despising cowardice in others, I wished to prove myself no coward. Believing in the good, the gentle, the beautiful things of life, I addressed myself to the sweet duty of keeping these attributes for my children's sake and my own. And in striving to provide a living for them, I found a success beyond my wildest dreams.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
for the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
... 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
Image
Success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
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
Image
Imagination is a valuable asset in business and she has a sister, Understanding, who also serves. Together they make a splendid team and business problems dissolve and the impossible is accomplished by their ministrations.... Imagination concerning the world's wants and the individual's needs should be the Alpha and Omega of self-education.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Image
... 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
Image
Not only is orderliness an economy it produces rest.
Alice Foote MacDougall