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The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.

The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before.

Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.

The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler.

Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

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.

Honesty, capacity, and industry are nowhere more indispensable than in public employment.

Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.

All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves’ work—mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil.

Throw away, in the first place, all ambition beyond that of doing the day's work well.

Take no thought for the morrow. Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Let the day's work suffice; live for it, regardless of what the future has in store, believing that to-morrow should take thought for the things of itself.