The quote database

The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study.

The suspension of one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope.

Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like.

Oh, if our friends would but put off anatomising one till after one was safely dead, and call to mind that, previously, we have nerves to be agonised and morbid brains to be driven mad!

Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.

The strong man who in the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him to sudden collapse.

Such increase is destined to keep pace with the growth of our population, until, without a figure of speech, an army of officeholders may be spread over the land.

If we do not watch, we lose our opportunities; if we do not make haste, we are left behind; our best hours escape us, the worst are to come.

If we stay in process, within ourselves, in the joy of the doing, we will never choke at the finish line.

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy

Do all that you can do in a perfect manner every day, but do it without haste, worry, or fear. Go as fast as you can, but never hurry.

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

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

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.

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

Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Let the day's work suffice; live for it, regardless of what the future has in store, believing that to-morrow should take thought for the things of itself.