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Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.

At first sight there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.

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.

It tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.

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.

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 trained, as the hand and eye can be trained; it can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and by similar methods.

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

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

The prime reason for social intercourse is mutual need; and as soon as that is satisfied, boredom drives people together once more.

Ordinary people are sociable and complaisant just from the very opposite feeling;--to bear others' company is easier for them than to bear their own.

It is the monotony of his own nature that makes a man find solitude intolerable.

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.

Profound and powerful forces are shaking and remaking our world, and the urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

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.

Without diversion no joy, with diversion no sadness.

Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he seeks it with disquiet, that he cannot regain it?

all the misfortunes of men arise from one thing only, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own chamber

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

The very thing which is now the cause of thy great grief ought to have brought thee tranquillity.

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.

There are but two directions in this life in which you can grow; backward or forward.