Quotes About Dedication

You see me in my most virile moment when you see me doing what I do. When I am directing, a special energy comes upon me. ... It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.

Opposition inflames the enthusiast, never converts him.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Reason alone is insufficient to make us enthusiastic in any matter.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

He only is exempt from failures who makes no effort.

It is a very dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.

Men must try and try again.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death.

Most men fail, not through lack of education, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objects and principles.

I plunged into the job of creating something from nothing. ... Though I hadn't a penny left, I considered cash money as the smallest part of my resources. I had faith in a living God, faith in myself, and a desire to serve.

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.

Friendship is the allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppression, the sanctuary of our calamities, the counselor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission of our thoughts, the exercise and improvement of what we dedicate.

Before I was a genius I was a drudge.

Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

If you have something to do that is worthwhile doing, don't talk about it ... do it.

For purposes of action, nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.

Unless you give yourself to some great cause, you haven't even begun to live.

Laboring toward distant aims sets the mind in a higher key, and puts us at our best.