Echoes

With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow — I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.

True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, 'Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?' And Joe said, 'I've got something he can never have.' And I said, 'What on earth could that be, Joe?' And Joe said, 'The knowledge that I've got enough.' Not bad!

He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don't give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.

That is not riches, which may be lost; virtue is our true good and the true reward of its possessor. That cannot be lost; that never deserts us, but when life leaves us. As to property and external riches, hold them with trembling; they often leave their possessor in contempt, and mocked at for having lost them.

Faith is the best wealth for a man in this world. Righteousness when well practised brings happiness. Truth is the sweetest of flavours. They say the life of one living by wisdom is the best.

In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains.

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity. (15)

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the one who hankers after more.

Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

The fashion of this world passeth away and I would fain occupy myself with the things that are abiding.

I have arrived. I am home. In the here, in the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.

With parsimony a little is sufficient; without it nothing is sufficient; but frugality makes a poor man rich.

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment. Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else.