The proper, wise balancingof one’s whole life may depend upon thefeasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.
Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.
You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.
It is difficult to make a reputation, but is even more difficult seriously to mar a reputation once properly made — so faithful is the public.
without the power to concentrate thatis to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.
The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.
And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurt us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent.
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Any change even a change for the better is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
No matter what has happened always behave as if nothing had happened.
The parents exist to teach the child but also they must learn what the child has to teach them and the child has a very great deal to teach them.
It is well when judging a friend to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
A sense of the value of time … is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
We shall never have more time. We have and have always had all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going. … Concentrate on something useful.
If you’ve ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life.
The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.
Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.