Echoes

Anyone who lives a sedentary life and does not exercise, even if he eats good foods and takes care of himself according to proper medical principles — all his days will be painful ones and his strength shall wane.

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.

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.

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.

Walking is man's best medicine.

Idleness and lack of occupation tend — nay are dragged — towards evil.

The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.

Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.

As long as a person exercises, exerts himself greatly, does not eat to the point of being overly full, and keeps his bowels soft, illness will not come upon him and his strength will increase.

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

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

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.

Action is movement with intelligence. The world is filled with movement. What the world needs is more conscious movement, more action.

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Be thou never without something to do; be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or doing something that is useful to the community.

Work is no disgrace; it is idleness which is a disgrace.

Accumulated wealth is saved by spending, just as incoming fresh water is saved by letting out stagnant water.

It is solved by walking.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.

A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. [...] If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise.

Be ever active in the management of the economy, because the root of wealth is economic activity; inactivity brings material distress.

Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.