The quote database

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

When he undertakes to play a part on the stage, and to persuade the world to think more about him than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment.

Anyone who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight of responsibility.

The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.

If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

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.