To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Real life is, to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.
What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.
Good is not good, where better is expected.
Nobody has things just as he would like them. The thing to do is to make a success with what material I have. It is a sheer waste of time and soul-power to imagine what I would do if things were different. They are not different.
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Better is the enemy of the good.
If you aspire to the highest place, it is no disgrace to stop at the second, or even the third, place.
Genius does what it must, talent does what it can.
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Results are what you expect; consequences are what you get.
To expect life to be tailored to our specifications is to invite frustration.
The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.
The chief pang of most trials is not so much the actual suffering itself as our own spirit of resistance to it.
Each of us does, in effect, strike a series of "deals" or compromises between the wants and longings of the inner self, and an outer environment that offers certain possibilities and sets certain limitations.
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
