Quote

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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Alice Foote MacDougall
Age: 77 †
Born: 1867
Born: March 2
Died: 1945
Died: February 10
Writer
New York City
New York
Things
Ordinary
Lower
Absorbing
Life
Duty
Solution
Upper
Becomes
Ego
Duties
Working
Performance
Toil
Story
Performances
Regular
Toils
Stories
Solutions
Floor
Forcefully
Problem
Moved
Routine
Silently
Mind
Toward
Motivated
Duality

More quotes by 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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... 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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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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I am always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future business career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training.
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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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
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Not only is orderliness an economy it produces rest.
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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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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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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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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One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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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
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For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.
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
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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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Perhaps nothing in all my business has helped me more than faith in my fellow man. From the very first I felt confident that I could trust the great, friendly public. So I told it quite simply what I thought, what I felt, what I was trying to do. And the response was quick, sure, and immediate.
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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... 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
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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