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Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.
The complete collection
Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.
The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.
Free labour has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.
Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which is the hardest test.
It is because it is so much easier to shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your average man can do.
If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
There were times when his optimism appeared forced and formal though I believe it was not really so: there were times when I have almost hated him for his infernal cheerfulness.
His capacity for work was prodigious, and when his own work happened to take less than his full time he characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an animal.
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.
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.
A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.
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.
When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off.
The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted
The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by his ordinary day's work.
If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.
In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect.
The truth is, that our nature is essentially restless in its character: we very soon get tired of having nothing to do; it is intolerable boredom.
In old age it is indeed a consolation to think that the work of life is over and done with.
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!
God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.
Attribution contested
Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.