All quotes

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

if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted

When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off.

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.

To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity--what a miserable thing it is!

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.

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.

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.

To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

In society you will not find health, but in nature.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.

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.

A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it.

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.

The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?

Is pleasure, then, the object of your being, and not action, and the exercise of your powers?

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.

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?

No one may become a real leader in any walk of life without practicing the habit of doing more work and better work than that for which he is paid.

To stick to a thing till you are master, is a test of intellectual discipline and power.