Always play like an underdog.
If happiness is what you’re after, you’re gonna be let down frequently and you’re gonna be unhappy much of your time. Joy though, joy is the feeling that we have doing what we are fashioned to do, no matter the outcome.
Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
It is wonderful to think how men of very large estates not only spend their yearly income, but are often actually in want of money. It is clear, they have not value for what they spend.
Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.
God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.
You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.
We are just statistics, born to consume resources.
