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These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War

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

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

The whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism. A vague glimpse even of an Analytical Engine at length opened out, and I pursued with enthusiasm the shadowy vision.

Competence to age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had.

The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations.

A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.

The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated--being suddenly removed from them--they seemed as dead to me.

Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.

Besides my daylight servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like.

From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.

It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round--and what is it all for?

The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social relation, the interchange of functional service, wherein the individual is most advantaged, not by his own exertions for his own goods, but by the exchange of his exertions with the exertions of others for goods produced by them together.

Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel opposition, at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as man’s.

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

To teach, to rule, to make, to decorate, to distribute,—these are not sex-functions: they are race-functions.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

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.

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

The progress of society rests upon the increasing collectivity of human labor.

The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.

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

I walked out of there to prepare for the next audition, and the next audition, and the next one.