76
To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity--what a miserable thing it is!
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77
The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.
78
From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life had been occupied in some kind of labour; though I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports.
79
There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost.
80
To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.
81
How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.
Henry David Thoreauverified·Journal, Volume II: 1850-September 15, 1851 (ed. Bradford Torrey)·February 18, 1851
82
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
83
Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.
84
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.
85
The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?
86
Is pleasure, then, the object of your being, and not action, and the exercise of your powers?
87
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.
88
Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?
89
In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.
90
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality
91
There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet every body fools us out of it that has a mind to it.
92
Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
93
All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.
94
The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it is the fruit of “genius” (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)
Attribution contested
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains is one of the most quoted sentences in English and Carlyle did not write it. This is what he wrote, and the differences are real: transcendent, not infinite; trouble, not pains; and first of all, which concedes that taking trouble is only where genius starts. The familiar wording appears later in the century in other hands and is usually traced to Jane Ellice Hopkins in 1870. Carlyle got the credit because he got there first with the thought.
95
Drive thy business, let not that drive thee; and early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, as Poor Richard says.
Attribution contested
Franklin made the proverb famous and is now given it outright, but he did not write it. It is recorded in English more than a century before he was born, in the Book of St Albans in 1496 and in John Clarke's proverb collection of 1639. Franklin's own contribution is the half nobody quotes: drive thy business, let not that drive thee.