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The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.

When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off.

A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by his ordinary day's work.

if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted

There is a direct pleasure in seeing work grow under one's hands day by day, until at last it is finished.

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

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 hardships and dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in sunshine.

How to make the getting our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not life but death that we get.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived

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.

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

I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

Love the art which you have learned, humble though it be, and in it find your recreation.

Others, who love the art that they have made their own, exhaust themselves with labouring at it unwashed and unfed.

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

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.

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.

Work educates the body, as study educates the mind; and that is the best state of society in which there is some work for every man's leisure, and some leisure for every man's work.

Life seems terribly foreshortened as they look back and the mountain they set themselves to climb in youth turns out to be a mere spur of immeasurably higher ranges when, by failing breath, they reach the top.

Struggle, work, fight as I would, I seemed to get nowhere and accomplish nothing.

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