Great Throughts Treasury

"By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment."

"Get into the habit of being both strict and friendly toward yourself; demand a certain standard of performance; approve of yourself, even reward yourself if you attain it. For too often we pursue just the wrong tactics. When we should be acting, we indulge or excuse ourselves for inactivity; we then upbraid and punish ourselves ruthlessly and futility. The scolding is futile because we somehow feel that, if we have been severe and cutting to ourselves, we have in some way atoned for the fault of non-performance. We have not, of course. We have not done what we planned, and we have discouraged and hurt ourselves in the bargain."

"Act as if it were impossible to fail."

"The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago."

"The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility."

"All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is to - act as if it were impossible to fail."

"There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow."

"Old habits are strong and jealous."

"A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved."

"Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid."

"All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right about face which turns us from failure to success."

"I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked."

"Man's mind is not a container to be filled but rather a fire to be kindled."

"Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion."

"Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world."

"Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer-the craftsman and the critic in him- are actually hostile to the good of the artist's side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two."

"Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier."

"So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs."