Procrastination is suicide on the installment plan.
Time is the explicable raw material of everything.
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
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.
The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.
The great advantage of being in a rut is that when one is in a rut, one knows exactly where one is.
The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness. If men and women practiced mental calisthenics as they do physical calisthenics, they would purge their brains of this foolishness.
The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.
I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.
I think it rather fine, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it is to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire.
If you’ve ever really been poor, you remain poor at heart all your life.
I ought to reflect again and again, and yet again, that the beings that I have to steer are just as inevitable in the scheme of evolution as I am myself; have just as much right to be themselves as I am entitled to; and they all deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself.
Being a husband is a whole-time job.
I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.
Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin’s lot.
Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.
If you’ve ever really been poor you remain poor at heart all your life. I’ve often walked when I could very well afford to take a taxi because I simply couldn’t bring myself to waste the shilling it would cost.