William Faulkner Quotes

Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages.

I’ve seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.

Some people spend so much time hunting treasure that they fail to see it all around them. It's like sifting through gold to find the silt.

Sometimes people in search of a better fishing hole can't see the body of water in front of them.

The disease of men is that they neglect their own fields and go to weed the fields of others.

What happened? Satan was busy?

The devil fools with the best laid plans.

I learned that I'm so busy with what I'm doing, so focused on what I'm doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people.

Some people spend their lives failing and never notice.

I lost the match. I blame only myself for this. There were many opportunities to win. But I missed them, no one else.

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

Beauty is all about us, but how many are blind! They look at the wonder of this earth and seem to see nothing. People move hectically but give little thought to where they are going. They seek excitement ... as if they were lost and desperate.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

Life comes in the form of opportunities, which are easy to recognize, after they have been wasted.

Don't worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don't even try.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.

The only reason men fail is because of broken focus

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

No one sees what is before his feet: they scan the tracks of heaven.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

People who fail, excel at avoiding opportunity.

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.