The quote database

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

There were times when his optimism appeared forced and formal though I believe it was not really so: there were times when I have almost hated him for his infernal cheerfulness.

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

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

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

In old age it is indeed a consolation to think that the work of life is over and done with.

There is a direct pleasure in seeing work grow under one's hands day by day, until at last it is finished.

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 present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

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.

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.

These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.

The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations.

Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

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.

It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round--and what is it all for?

The outlook was cheerless indeed, but much work had to be done and we could not yield to the desire to remain in the sleeping-bags.

There are some men who will do more than their share of work and who will attempt more than they are physically able to accomplish.

The labour of the body frees us from the pains of the mind, and thus makes the poor happy.

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.

The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.

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.