Quotes About Inspiration

Doris Kearns Goodwin

A mysterious process unfolds as the president and the flag become rallying points for all Americans. At such moments, if the president is able to meet the challenge, he is able to give shape, to organize, to create and recreate the nation.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

At the Second Inaugural, Lincoln asked his countrymen "to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." These same words nourished Franklin Roosevelt. He drew upon them, he said, because Abraham Lincoln had set goals for the future "in terms of which the human mind cannot improve.

There was a hush and everybody was holding their breath," Frances Perkins recalled. After what seemed a long-drawn moment of tension, he reached the rostrum, handed off his crutches, gripped the lectern edges with his powerful, viselike grip, tilted back his head, and "across his face there flashed a vast, world-encompassing smile.

When they returned home, he took his young son aside. "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should," he admonished. "You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." Teedie responded immediately, according to Corinne, giving his

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.

He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office," Taft noted, "and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life," Edith later wrote, "and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

Regardless of one's impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.

We have but a short life to live here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful.... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.

The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

He believed from the beginning that the heart and soul of an advertising agency is its creative work.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.