Echoes

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.

The mind must be given relaxation — it will rise improved and sharper after a good rest. Just as we must not force fertile farmland, for uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigor.

In reading of many books is distraction. Accordingly, since you cannot read all the books which you may possess, it is enough to possess only as many books as you can read.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one — well, at least one and a half, I'm sure.

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is best. A horse gives but a kind of half exercise, and a carriage is no better than a cradle.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

I can only think while walking; as soon as I stop, I no longer think, and my mind only moves with my feet.

If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where that heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied those who spend the weekend in town astride a radiator.

It is certain that habit eventually has such power over human nature that it becomes, as it were, a second nature, and forces it to practise that to which it has become accustomed, regardless of whether or not it is good for health.

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. 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.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply; and living simply is voluntary poverty.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.

A person who is said to be proficient at the arts is like a fool. Because of his foolishness in concerning himself with just one thing, he thinks of nothing else and thus becomes proficient.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Culture, as I understand it, is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture is therefore essentially the art of loafing.

Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard.