“At forty he [the villain, Jack Bolt] was an embittered man who blamed the world for the success that had never come to him, failing to understand that the fault was his own. He was one of those who had always wanted to start at the top, and the idea of consistent effort to get there had seemed futile to him.”
Louis L’Amour The Riders of High Rock
“Distance doesn’t matter. It is only the first step that is difficult.”
Marquise du Deffand, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 18, 2002
“The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
G.K. Chesterton as a standalone quotation in illustration, without further attribution, in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when.’”
P.G. Wodehouse quoted by Joseph Bottum in First Things October 2005 # 156
“Since life passes, whether sweet or bitter,/ Since the soul must pass the lips. Whether in Nishpur or in Balkh,/ Drink wine, for after you and I are gone many a moon/ Will pass from old to new, from new to old.”
Omar Khayyam, cited in Sadegh Hedayat’s deeply disturbed novel The Blind Owl
“‘The history of the world is but the biography of great men,’ wrote Carlisle in 1841. ‘There is properly no history,’ echoed Emerson that same year, ‘only biography.’”
The Beaver February-March 1998
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington]
“Those who fail in life are however very apt to assume a tone of injured innocence, and conclude too hastily that everybody excepting themselves has had a hand in their personal misfortunes…. Dr. Johnson, who came up to London with a single guinea in his pocket, and who once accurately described himself in his signature to a letter addressed to a noble lord, as IMPRANSUS, or Dinnerless, has honestly said, ‘All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust; I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help