Quotes from Dorothea Brande

With the time and energy we spend in making failure a certainty we might have certain success.

Yet when it comes to going straight to the appointments we make with ourselves and our own fulfillment, we all act very much like the hero of this silly fable: we drive the wrong way. We fail where we might have succeeded by spending the same power and time.

Failure indicates that energy has been poured into the wrong channel. It takes energy to fail.

When failure comes about through devoting precious hours to time-killing pursuits, we can all see that energy is being diverted from its proper channel.

Then why do we fail? Especially, why do we work hard at failure? Because, beside being creatures subject to the Will to Live and the Will to Power, we are driven by another will, the Will to Fail, or Die.

Think back to some encounter you had today in your office, in a store, with a servant or tradesman in your home. Try to remember just the form your request took. Making all due allowances for courtesy, or for the respectfulness due to superiors and elders, was there not in addition a tentativeness about your request? Didn't you ask for coöperation in such a way as to leave room for refusal, or grudging action, or for being ignored?

many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society.

It is well to understand as early as possible in one's writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us

But I came across a sentence in the book I was reading, HUMAN PERSONALITY, by F. W. H. Myers, which was so illuminating that I put the book aside to consider all the ideas suggested in that one penetrating hypothesis. When I picked up the book again I was a different person.

The only way to do this successfully is to have a well-thought-out set of standards drawn up for each type of work that you do, and in advance. If you wait till anyone item is finished you may find yourself reasoning after the fact, defending the fact-accomplished, and perhaps blinding yourself to real insufficiencies in it.

As Dorothy Canfield Fisher says in her excellent little book for parents and teachers, Self-Reliance, "Success or failure in adult life depends largely on the energy, courage and self-reliance with which one attacks the problem of making his dreams come true. Self-confidence in any enterprise comes as a rule from remembrance of past success.

It is true that if you look exclusively to please others what you do will seldom be worth doing; but if your idea of success includes recognition, then the more you can learn imaginatively of your audience the better. If, knowing their tastes, you can give them not only what they want but something much better than they, being nonprofessionals, could imagine, you are sure of your success.

Be careful that you do not turn these first steps into merely a more elaborate way of playing the old game of day-dreaming with yourself. Do something every day towards your intention, however remote your goal may have to be.

Those who are still slaves to dreams, to the Will to Fail, are made uncomfortable by the sight of anyone who is breaking free.

Breathing is one of the few involuntary actions of the body over which we can exercise voluntary control. That is to say, it is on the border-line between the regions of the conscious and the unconscious. The man or woman who can speak or be silent as he chooses is the individual who has self-control.

These seem such minor matters, but it is the sum of small things successfully done that lifts a life out of bondage to the humdrum.

Confident, steady, freely-flowing action is what we need. Then safe delight begins. The mind, cleared of its doubts, begins to expand and enjoy its own activity; the rewards of satisfactory action begin to show themselves.

Thirdly, the advice is not to dash out and impress others by posing, pretending or downright lying about one's successfulness. The only one to impress, at least at first, is yourself, and that only to the extent of making for yourself a congenial working-atmosphere. The recommendation, once more, is simply this: Act as if it were impossible to fail.

Long before Freud made his contribution to modern thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De Imaginatione—Concerning the Imagination—was discriminating between two kinds of revery: the one retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his man's work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the successful man.

Now, this is an age of alibis. We all know a little too much about the Glands Regulating Personality, and the Havoc raised by Resistances, and so on. Never since the world began were there such good opportunities to be lazy with distinction.

Act as if it were impossible to fail.

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this: Act as if it were impossible to fail.

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 towards success.