All quotes

When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off.

The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience.

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

There is no royal road to the control of the brain.

The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the will; so that the brain may act according to the precepts which the brain itself gives.

The brain can be trained, as the hand and eye can be trained; it can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and by similar methods.

My aim is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as distinguished from the preliminaries to living.

The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind thoughts.

A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by his ordinary day's work.

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who is braced to effort neither in the office nor out of it

It is always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it.

The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.

if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted

If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.

In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect.