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One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.

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
Essentials
Tradition
Business
Must
Cling
Eliminate
Traditional
Essential

More quotes by 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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Not only is orderliness an economy it produces rest.
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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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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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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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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When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.
Alice Foote MacDougall
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a few hours with Beethoven are more restful than sleep.
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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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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The small perplexities of small minds eddy and boil about you. Confident from the experience that has led you out of these same dangers, you attack each problem as it appears, unafraid.
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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... 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