The quote database

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

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.

There is an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to develop a student's mind.

By the aid of the Mechanical Notation, the Analytical Engine became a reality: for it became susceptible of demonstration.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.

To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step.

The brain of man is the social organ, the organ of communication. Through it flows the current of thought, whereby we are enabled to work together.

All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.

The style shall be simple and familiar; but style is the image of character; and the habits of correct writing may produce, without labour or design, the appearance of art and study.

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

Genius is free to announce its inventions and discoveries, and the hand is free to accomplish whatever the head conceives not incompatible with the rights of a fellow-being.

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.

It is not always recognized that the work itself is a great educator, and that acute cleverness in the line of work to which he is fitted comes to the worker.

These possibilities of mental development are still further increased when the man makes his own records. This leads to closer attention, to more interest in the work, and to a realization of the man as to what the record really means, and what value it represents.

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

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.

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

Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.