Bootstraps Quotes

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

“You are here to light up the passion of your life and shine it as brightly as you possibly can for all to see. You are an example for all others on their path." - Bootstraps: A Woman's Guide to Personal Power”

“Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.”

“But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.”

“You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.”“Well, didn’t you? You were there.”“No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.”“Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.”“But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.”“Well, didn’t you?”

“In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.”

“None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.”

“Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

“Many movies about people recovering, moving on, and redeeming themselves are really wonderful and inspiring. But I think the more sentimental ones that are less good make me feel isolated - like, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the guys in the movies, there is something wrong with you. That's a shame.”

“Humanity cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation; life does not come from crystals; poetry does not come from donkeys; international peace does not come from wars; social justice does not come from selfishness. With all our knowledge of chemistry we cannot make a human life in our laboratories because we lack the unifying, vivifying principal of a soul which comes only from God. Life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. It is not the result of the necessary ascent of man but the loving descent of God.”