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The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.
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The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.
Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.
Free labour has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.
There were times when his optimism appeared forced and formal though I believe it was not really so: there were times when I have almost hated him for his infernal cheerfulness.
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.
His capacity for work was prodigious, and when his own work happened to take less than his full time he characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an animal.
If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
It is because it is so much easier to shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your average man can do.
Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which is the hardest test.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity--what a miserable thing it is!
There is a direct pleasure in seeing work grow under one's hands day by day, until at last it is finished.
The truth is, that our nature is essentially restless in its character: we very soon get tired of having nothing to do; it is intolerable boredom.
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