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My aim is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as distinguished from the preliminaries to living.

The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience.

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the will; so that the brain may act according to the precepts which the brain itself gives.

To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity--what a miserable thing it is!

Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.

To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.

Therefore we ought to exercise ourselves in small things, and beginning with them to proceed to the greater.

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

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

Do not then vainly imagine that you can obtain the heavenly possessions without making an effort.

Idleness and a strong will cannot go together, and procrastination is a total barrier to the acquisition of purposeful action.

These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction.

Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

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.

She is besotted with innocent little ambitions, and does not understand this apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for her.

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

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.

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

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

No man can hinder the proper work of the mind.

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.

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.

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.

The ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive.