—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Profiles of the Future
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
—WERNHER VON BRAUN
What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.
—THEODORE ROETHKE
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies
in a person’s determination.
—TOMMY LASORDA
The impossible is often the untried.
—JIM GOODWIN
All things are possible until they are proved impossible—and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.
—PEARL S. BUCK
A Bridge for Passing
Progress begins with the belief that what is necessary is possible.
—NORMAN COUSINS
Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
—ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Everything looks impossible for the people who never try anything.
—JEAN-LOUIS ETIENNE
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.
—PEARL S. BUCK
Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
—CHARLES F. KETTERING
Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.
—DOUG LARSON
IF YOU WANT A PLACE IN THE SUN . . .
If you want a place in the sun, you’ve got to put up with a few blisters.
—ABIGAIL VAN BUREN
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Probably the most honest “self-made man” ever was the one we heard say: “I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.”
—JAMES THOM
You can’t expect to make a place in the sun for yourself if you keep taking refuge under the family tree.
—CLAUDE MCDONALD
in The Christian Word
The important thing in life is not to have a good hand but to play it well.
—LOUIS-N. FORTIN
Pensées, Proverbes, Maximes
Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.
—DAVID BLY
in Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
Showing up is 80 percent of life.
—WOODY ALLEN
If you play to win, as I do, the game never ends.
—STAN MIKITA
Journal (Edmonton, Alberta)
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.
—GEN. COLIN L. POWELL
in The Black Collegian
Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
—GEN. GEORGE S. PATTON
Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.
—AL BERNSTEIN
Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—PETER DRUCKER
Success is often just an idea away.
—FRANK TYGER
The only thing that ever sat its way to success was a hen.
—SARAH BROWN
Success has a simple formula: do your best, and people may like it.
—SAM EWING
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
—BENJAMIN DISRAELI
You’re never a loser until you quit trying.
—MIKE DITKA
There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you about it?
—KIN HUBBARD
Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.
—AN WANG
Lessons: An Autobiography
Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.
—DAVID FROST
Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
—ARNOLD H. GLASOW
Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.
—JOE PATERNO
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
—GEORGE F. WILL
Always do what you say you are going to do. It is the glue and fiber that binds successful relationships.
—JEFFRY A. TIMMONS
The Entrepreneurial Mind
A FINE LANDSCAPE IS LIKE A PIECE OF MUSIC . . .
There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast.
—PAUL SCOTT MOWRER
The House of Europe
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
—JOHN MUIR
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
—CARL SAGAN
Our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them unless we were meant to be immortal.
—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like falling leaves.
—JOHN MUIR
There is no silence like that of the mountains.
—GUY BUTLER
A Local Habitation
I have seen the sea when it is stormy and wild; when it is quiet and serene; when it is dark and moody. And in all its moods, I see myself.
—MARTIN BUXBAUM
April hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.
—MARTIN LUTHER
Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees / Rock’d in the cradle of the western breeze.
—WILLIAM COWPER
Spring, thy name is color.
—LIBBIE FUDIM
Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party!”
—ROBIN WILLIAMS
A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the king.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn.
—Quoted by LEWIS GRIZZARD in Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You
The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
—HENRY VAN DYKE
Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
—DOUG LARSON
Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—HENRY JAMES
If a June night could talk, it would probably boast that it invented romance.
—BERN WILLIAMS
Until you have heard the whippoorwill, either nearby or in the faint distance, you have not experienced summer night.
—HENRY B
EETLE HOUGH
in Vineyard Gazette (Edgartown, Massachusetts)
Oh, the summer night has a smile of light, and she sits on a sapphire throne.
—B. W. PROCTER
The experience of drought and dust storms remains central to the psychology of the prairie west; more than the intermittent affluence of postwar decades, it tints a westerner’s outlook on life. He continues to live in next year country, where he smokes a pack of hope a day.
—MARK ABLEY
Beyond Forget
For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad.
—EDWIN WAY TEALE
Autumn Across America
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
—ALBERT CAMUS
Autumn carries more gold in its hand than all the other seasons.
—JIM BISHOP
October’s poplars are flaming torches lighting the way to winter.
—NOVA S. BAIR
in Capper’s Weekly
October, here’s to you. Here’s to the heady aroma of the frost-kissed apples, the winey smell of ripened grapes, the wild-as-the-wind smell of hickory nuts and the nostalgic whiff of that first wood smoke.
—KEN WEBER
in Providence, R.I., Journal-Bulletin
Autumn is a season followed immediately by looking forward to spring.
—DOUG LARSON
Winter is not a season; it’s an occupation.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS
Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm.
—BERN WILLIAMS
in The National Enquirer
No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.
—HAL BORLAND
Sundial of the Seasons
All sunshine makes a desert.
—ARABIC PROVERB
I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.
—ADELINE KNAPP
When there is a river in your growing up, you probably always hear it.
—ANN ZWINGER
Run, River, Run
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
—WILLA CATHER
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
—D. ELTON TRUEBLOOD
I never knew how soothing trees are—many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
—D. H. LAWRENCE
The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.
—RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke
A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire; but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart.
—HAL BORLAND
Sundial of the Seasons
He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
—ENGLISH PROVERB
Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.
—LUTHER BURBANK
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
—GEORGE ELIOT
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
—IRIS MURDOCH
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
—D. H. LAWRENCE
D. H. Lawrence and Italy
I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Bring Me a Unicorn
I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.
—PETE HAMILL
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
—CHINESE PROVERB
Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
—MONTAIGNE
I’ve always regarded nature as the clothing of God.
—ALAN HOVHANESS
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
—GEORGE SANTAYANA
The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence. It may be a theatrical “encore.”
—G. K. CHESTERTON
Everybody wants to go back to nature—but not on foot.
—WERNER MITSCH
Never a daisy grows but a mystery guides the growing.
—RICHARD REALF
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
—HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.
—EMERSON M. PUGH
Science cannot answer the deepest questions. As soon as you ask why there is something instead of nothing, you have gone beyond science. I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is the explanation for the miracle of existence—why there is something instead of nothing.
—COSMOLOGIST ALLAN R. SANDAGE
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Unknowingly, we plow the dust of stars, blown about us by the wind, and drink the universe in a glass of rain.
—IHAB HASSAN
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
—EDEN PHILLPOTTS
A Shadow Passes
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
—GALILEO
To define the universe would be to contain it, and that would be to limit existence.
—DAVID BERESFORD
in The Weekly Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg, South Africa)
The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind—a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.
—WOODY ALLEN
LEAVE A LANDSCAPE AS IT WAS . . .
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
—ROBERT LYND
The Blue Lion and Other Essays
Don’t blow it—good planets are hard to find.
—Quoted in Time
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet t
o put it on?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
—ANSEL ADAMS
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
—EDWARD ABBEY
Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long.
—OGDEN NASH
Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.
—THOR HEYERDAHL
Fatu-Hiva
You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
—FRANK DEFORD
in Sports Illustrated
Since the beginning each generation has fought nature. Now, in the life-span of a single generation, we must turn around 180 degrees and become the protector of nature.
—JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU
We haven’t got too much time left to ensure that government of the earth, by the earth, for the earth, shall not perish from the people.