James Branch Cabell Quotes

I think some things are just meant to happen; you can't change your fate. Maybe we have a small amount of control.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

I had always been a fatalist about my career. What was to be was to be.

Future comes by itself, progress does not.

I believe everything falls into place as it's supposed to.

There is neither creation nor destruction, neither destiny nor free will, neither path nor achievement. This is the final truth.

In order not to annul our free will, I judge it true that Fortune may be mistress of one half our actions but then even she leaves the other half, or almost, under our control.

It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.

I always tell people happiness comes in one word: progress. I don't care what you achieve.

If I've learned nothing else, it's that time and practice equal achievement.

Celebrate what you've accomplished, but raise the bar a little higher each time you succeed.

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

To become successful and outstanding at something, we don't have to come up with something new; we need only find ways of doing it better.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

Success is the potential destiny of all created things

For all the progress, we recognize we're very far from the finish line.

Progress is the ultimate motivation.

Your latter days are supposed to be greater than your former days.

If you work at something, you get better at it.

One of the greatest rewards for doing can be the chances it gives to do some more - even better.

Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

You have to prove your success in order to grow.

I expect us to win. I expect us to get better every day.