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A wise man is never so busy as in the solitary contemplation of God and the works of Nature.

Oh! the delights of rest when a man comes to be weary, and of meat when he is heartily hungry.

Business that is ready and practicable goes off with ease; but when it is too heavy for the bearer, they fall both together.

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.

There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet every body fools us out of it that has a mind to it.

Love the art which you have learned, humble though it be, and in it find your recreation.

In rest you go beyond these limits, and beyond what is enough; but in action you do not fill the measure, and remain well within your powers.

Others, who love the art that they have made their own, exhaust themselves with labouring at it unwashed and unfed.

No man can hinder the proper work of the mind.

Bear toil and pain, not as if wretched under it, nor as courting pity or admiration.

For death also is one piece of the business of life, and, here as elsewhere, it is enough to do well what comes to our hand.

Is pleasure, then, the object of your being, and not action, and the exercise of your powers?

the mind can convert and change everything that impedes its activity into matter for its action; hindrance in its work becomes its real help, and every obstruction makes for its progress

Am I equipped for nothing but to lie among the bed-clothes and keep warm?

a man who is always living in the midst of these studies and labours does not perceive when old age creeps upon him

You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work. You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly.

With tireless energy and eager zeal, colored women have, since their emancipation, been continuously prosecuting the work of educating and elevating their race, as though upon themselves alone devolved the accomplishment of this great task.

Shirking responsibility has never been a fault with which colored women might be truthfully charged.

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.

I had, and still have, determined perseverance, but I soon found that it was in vain to occupy my mind beyond a certain time.

Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.

Life is a verb. We try our best. We don’t always do our best.

The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it.

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

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