All quotes

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.

Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he seeks it with disquiet, that he cannot regain it?

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

To not only take risks, but to be open to life. To accept new views and to be open to new opinions.

Do you think I was born to live the life of an oyster, such as I do live here?

The love of protecting too often degenerates into downright tyranny.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

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

The dullest eye in the world must surely be quickened by such trees as these.

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.

The world does not count races and nations that have nothing.

But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.

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.

The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.

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.

Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.

Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself

nature makes us free and unrestrained, but we bind and confine immure and force ourselves into small and scanty space

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines

Clumsy indeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left.