If you think it cannot be done, please do not interfere or…

“Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.”

Andre Dubus (1936–1999) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

Into the Silence.
Broken Vessels (1991)

“Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn't be done.”

Amelia Earhart (1897–1937) American aviation pioneer and author

As quoted in "She Drew Horses..." (2006) by Kelli Swan, p. 42
Disputed

“Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

Variant: Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

“It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be. The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us. In this matter we only possess a negative freedom of will, a noluntas.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of our destiny. … Theoretic truths not only are disputable, but their whole meaning and force lie in their being disputed, they spring from discussion. They live as long as they are discussed, and they are made exclusively for discussion. But destiny — what from a vital point of view one has to be or has not to be — is not discussed, it is either accepted or rejected. If we accept it, we are genuine; if not, we are the negation, the falsification of ourselves. Destiny does not consist in what we feel we should like to do; rather is it recognised in its clear features in the consciousness that we must do what we do not feel like doing.
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

“The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 53
1910s

“Do as you would be done by, is the surest method of pleasing.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

9 October 1747
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

“Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

“Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in The World's Laconics: Or, The Best Thoughts of the Best Authors (1853) by Everard Berkeley
Variant: Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they will.

“For those of us who try to keep remembering,
Try to do our better than our best.
Think of all the children in the drifts of snow.
Winners never quit, but winters never rest.”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

"This Is Not a Test".
She & Him : Volume One (2008)

“Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

“If you think it cannot be done, please do not interfere or interrupt the rest of us trying to do it.”

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