Sometimes some of the best words of wisdom come from surprising sources. Such are the following quotations that set me to thinking. Maybe they'll jump-start your own thought processes, too.
"Don't try to be what you're not. Find out what you are--and be the best one of it." ("Grace" to "Jim Anderson," characters on the old TV program Father Knows Best)
"You begin to mature as a writer, and to deserve the name, when you not only sense something wrong in your work, but can figure out how to fix it." (John Jakes in "Three Essentials for a Successful Writing Career," The Writer's Handbook, 1983)
"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and to make familiar things new." (Samuel Johnson)
"I don't live for food alone. I live on food and dreams. Give me mostly dreams. Cramp your guts when they growl. Push them against your backbone with your hand flat against your stomach. But don't cramp your dreams." (Jesse Stuart, To Teach, To Love)
"History is not made simply of an assembly of dates and statistics arranged in chronological order. History is the fabric woven of individual lives and activities, with all their coloring, emotions, and inconsistencies. History is the combination of ambitions, pulsations, victories, defeats, loves, hatreds, and achievements of peoples and generations. It is the essence and sum total of all the biographies of all the people." (Alben Barcley in Introduction to Henry Watterson: Reconstructed Rebel by Joseph Frazier Wall)
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." (Winston Churchill)
A Summary of the Life of Moses:
Forty years of being somebody (Pharoah's daughter's adopted son), forty years learning that he was nobody (his wilderness experiences), and forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody (leading Israel from Egypt, through the wilderness, to the Promised Land). (Anonymous)
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