I am always glad to think that my education was, for the most part, informal, and had not the slightest reference to a future business career. It left me free and untrammeled to approach my business problems without the limiting influence of specific training.
Alice Foote MacDougallfor the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.
Alice Foote MacDougallWhen one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.
Alice Foote MacDougallYou the rich are no whit more attractive or capable than you who were poor and struggling a few years back. But when before you plodded lonely and unappreciated, now the glamour of the motor and the smart apartment surrounds you with a tangible glory. It is amazing how many friends look you up, call you by name, and extol you, who were once a little timid, or indifferent, or utterly neglectful in your time of dire poverty. One has true friends when one is poor and no riches can be greater than that. They are not so obvious when one is rich.
Alice Foote MacDougallReally to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.
Alice Foote MacDougallWhen one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.
Alice Foote MacDougall