James Lane Allen Quotes

Adversity does not build character,it reveals it

You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain or rise with your thoughts, your vision, your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.

Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal him.

We do not attract what we want, But what we are.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

As you think, you travel, and as you love, you attract. You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.

Man's rise or fall, success or failure, happiness or unhappiness depends on his attitude ... a man's attitude will create the situation he imagines.

You are the handicap you must face. You are the one who must choose your place.

Good thoughts bear good fruit.

The truth in you remains as radiant as a star, as pure as light, as innocent as love itself.

You cannot travel within and stand still without.

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.

But the finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the hanging shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear.

I have yet to encounter that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier.

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.