The complete collection
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.
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.
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.
The greatest snipers and marksmen in the world don’t aim at the target, they aim on the other side of it.
We do our best when our destinations are beyond the “measurement,” when our reach continually exceeds our grasp, when we have immortal finish lines.
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?
This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being, and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off.
Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.
In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.
To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends.
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.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality
Time should not be allowed to pass without yielding fruits, in the form of something learnt worthy of being known, some good principle cultivated, or some good habit strengthened.
Work is the law of our being--the living principle that carries men and nations onward.
Life must needs be disgusting alike to the idle rich man as to the idle poor man, who has no work to do, or, having work, will not do it.
A man's life is to be measured by what he does in it, and what he feels in it.
A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
In this life we get nothing save by effort.
If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.
Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.