All quotes

When he undertakes to play a part on the stage, and to persuade the world to think more about him than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment.

Anyone who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight of responsibility.

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

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Throw away, in the first place, all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well.

Let the day's work suffice; live for it, regardless of what the future has in store, believing that to-morrow should take thought for the things of itself.

Free labour has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

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.

The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.

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.

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.

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.

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