51
Self-love is mainly to blame, making people fond of being first and aspiring in all matters, and insatiably desirous to engage in everything.
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Attribution
52
In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.
53
The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place.
54
All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for
55
Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.
56
One can only say 'God help us!' and plod on our weary way, cold and very miserable, though outwardly cheerful.
57
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality
58
It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues.
59
The road to success may be steep to climb, and it puts to the proof the energies of him who would reach the summit.
60
The mere drudgery undergone by some men in carrying on their undertakings has been something extraordinary, but the drudgery they regarded as the price of success.
61
Work educates the body, as study educates the mind; and that is the best state of society in which there is some work for every man's leisure, and some leisure for every man's work.
62
Work in moderation is healthy, as well as agreeable to the human constitution.
63
Energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details, and carries him onward and upward in every station in life.
64
Genius is 1 per cent. inspiration and 99 per cent. perspiration.
65
The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it is the fruit of “genius” (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all)
Attribution contested
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains is one of the most quoted sentences in English and Carlyle did not write it. This is what he wrote, and the differences are real: transcendent, not infinite; trouble, not pains; and first of all, which concedes that taking trouble is only where genius starts. The familiar wording appears later in the century in other hands and is usually traced to Jane Ellice Hopkins in 1870. Carlyle got the credit because he got there first with the thought.
66
Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look back and the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top.
67
I am now sending back to Belle Plain all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and purpose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.
68
Struggle, work, fight as I would, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing.
69
The Day of Miracles was past, and a long, gray road of dogged work lay ahead.
70
Rest and recreation are also necessary to his physical life.
71
When he undertakes to play a part on the stage, and to persuade the world to think more about him than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment.
William Hazlittverified·On Living to One's-Self, in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners·January 1821
72
The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.
73
We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.
74
The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before.
75
Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.