The quote database

To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

Our life is frittered away by detail

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.

Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end of life you shall not recover the former vigour of your frame.

The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most things are more rewarding when you break a sweat to get em.

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?

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.

It is doubtful whether a person could be a failure while engaged in work which he liked best.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy.

success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price, and it is yours.

Great tenacity of purpose is the only thing that will carry you over the hard places which appear in every career to ultimate triumph.