All quotes

There is no short cut to the making of these ideals into glad realities.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life. Respect everyone.

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

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.

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

Honesty, capacity, and industry are nowhere more indispensable than in public employment.

All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree.

Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.

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

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.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.

These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction.

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.

I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.

Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.

This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being, and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off.

Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Life must needs be disgusting alike to the idle rich man as to the idle poor man, who has no work to do, or, having work, will not do it.