Hortense Odlum Quotes

Adventure, without it, why live?

It seemed pathetic and terrible to me and it still does, that men and women work eight hours a day at jobs that bring them no joy, no reward save a few dollars.

How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it!

Living each day as a preparation for the next is an exciting way to live. Looking forward to something is much more fun than looking back at somethingand much more constructive. If we can prepare ourselves so that we never have to think, 'Oh, if I had only known, if I had only been ready,' our lives can really be the great adventure we so passionately want them to be.

One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have, comes from the knowledge that he can do some one thing superlatively well.

Our chaotic economic situation has convinced so many of our young people that there is no room for them. They become uncertain andrestless and morbid; they grab at false promises, embrace false gods and judge things by treacherous values. Their insecurity makes them believe that tomorrow doesn't matter and the ineffectualness of their lives makes them deny the ideals which we of an older generation acknowledged.

This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation.

With only one life to live we can't afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit.

A business career for a woman and her need for a woman's life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other.

As unmarried business women we must constantly use our opportunities in business in such a way that we are prepared for the marriage which may be ours tomorrow.

The home is a woman's natural background ... From the beginning I tried to have the policy of the store reflect as nearly as it was possible in the commercial world, those standards of comfort and grace which are apparent in a lovely home.

Not rarely, and this is especially true of wives and mothers, the motive behind assuming a disproportionate share of work and responsibility is completely unselfish. We want to protect, to spare those of whom we are fond. We forget that, regardless of the motive, the results of such action are almost always destructive and unproductive.