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These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy

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

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

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

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

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

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.

Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.

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 American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.

The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

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

It is notorious that a single successful effort of moral volition, such as saying 'no' to some habitual temptation, or performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power.

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.

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

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

Excitements, ideas, and efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.

The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.

Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

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