All quotes

These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.

The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort.

the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy

The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.

Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.

If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it.

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.

We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.

It is notorious that a single successful effort of moral volition, such as saying 'no' to some habitual temptation, or performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power.

First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.

We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.

The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before.

We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler.

The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent.