All quotes

To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends.

The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know--had always an inclination to be idle.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality

A man's life is to be measured by what he does in it, and what he feels in it.

Work is the law of our being--the living principle that carries men and nations onward.

Time should not be allowed to pass without yielding fruits, in the form of something learnt worthy of being known, some good principle cultivated, or some good habit strengthened.

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.

A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

In this life we get nothing save by effort.

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

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.

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.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.

Dreams without goals are just dreams, and they ultimately fuel disappointment.