Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“I only study the things I like; I apply my mind only to matters that interest me. They’ll be useful—or useless—to me or to others in due course, I’ll be given—or not given—the opportunity of benefiting from what I’ve learned. In any case, I’ll have enjoyed the inestimable advantage of doing things I like doing and following my own inclinations.”
Nicolas de Chamfort
“To see things in their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life.”
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life
“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
Kierkegaard, letter, 1847
“When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“…the man who works so moderately as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of works.”
Adam Smith
“Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.”
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life
“Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”
Francis Bacon
“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch
“He who chases two hares will catch neither.”
Publius Syrus
“Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”
Goethe
“It was on a bright day of midwinter, in New York. The little girl who eventually became me, but as yet was neither me nor anybody else in particular, but merely a soft anonymous morsel of humanity—this little girl, who bore my name, was going for a walk with her father. The episode is literally the first thing I can remember about her, and therefore I date the birth of her identity from that day.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
“Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to further progress.”
Samuel Johnson, Rambler
