All quotes

We do our best when our destinations are beyond the “measurement,” when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, when we have immortal finish lines.

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?

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

For equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense.

Free trade in labour and equality of training, intellectual or physical, is essential if the organic aptitudes of a sex or class are to be determined.

Give us labour and the training which fits for labour! We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for the race.

That even one individual in a society should be debarred from undertaking that form of social toil for which it is most fitted, makes an unnecessary deficit in the general social assets.

The past material conditions of life have gone for ever; no will of man can recall them.

The ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive.

We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less.

We make this demand, not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of the race.

Success is the child of two very plain parents--punctuality and accuracy.

In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.

it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker

The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be.

This joy of life, this joy of work, in man is absolutely true.

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes over our works.

To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best

I know that peace does not come through wishing for it--that there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy.

The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know--had always an inclination to be idle.

A hopeless feeling descends on one and is hard to fight off.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality