All quotes

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

To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity--what a miserable thing it is!

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived

Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?

Is pleasure, then, the object of your being, and not action, and the exercise of your powers?

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease: but men do not always take the right way.

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

Your life isn't meant to be a checklist given by others. Give yourself permission to experience life beyond accomplishing something. It's a delicate balance of achieving goals and being present to enjoy the moment. Do good and feel alive.