Alice Foote MacDougall Quotes

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.

Success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.

There is romance in coffee. It comes from the ends of the earth, and goes to the far corners of man's habitation.

Life is beset by many annoyances, and those that stand out above all are the life- insurance and advertising agents.

Work becomes at once a delight and a tyrant. For even when the time comes and you can relax, you hardly know how.

When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.

a few hours with Beethoven are more restful than sleep.

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.

For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

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.

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.

I simply don't believe in failure. In itself, it doesn't exist. We create it. We make ourselves fail.

Not only is orderliness an economy; it produces rest.

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.

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.

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.

One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.

... 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.