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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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

Nothing is so insupportable to man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without diversion, without study.

From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life had been occupied in some kind of labour; though I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports.

Any one can seek a job, but it requires a person of rare ability to create a job.

The men you see spending most of their time looking for higher and more lucrative positions are, nine times out of ten, men who have made worthless failures in other places.

We cannot get upon our feet, as a people, until we learn the saving habit; until we learn to save every nickel, every dime and every dollar that we can spare.

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

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

So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes?

So get out there. Give it everything you’ve got—whether it’s your time, your talent, your prayers, or your treasure.

Life is not only short, but uncertain, and art is not only long, but absorbing.

For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going back.

There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost.

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

Our young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.

These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction.

Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned you, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now.

A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.