“In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful break was apt to lurk just around the corner.”
Amelia Earhart
Last Flight (Primary source)
Earhart’s posthumous 1937 journal, compiled from dispatches during her final around-the-world attempt, becomes an inadvertent elegy for American optimism. Her matter-of-fact accounts of technical challenges and geographical wonders now read as her last transmission before vanishing into mystery and legend.
“It is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit. Hamlet would have been a bad aviator. He worried too much.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“Preparation, I have often said, is rightly two-thirds of any venture.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary source“Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization.”
— Amelia Earhart Primary sourceMore quotes by Amelia Earhart →
“A life of leisure, and a life of laziness, are two things.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death.”
— Leonardo da Vinci Primary source