Echoes

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

I found that a strict and regular life is the true way to conquer nature, and that the proverb which says that nature is so powerful is in part false.

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.

The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

If you're afraid — don't do it. If you're doing it — don't be afraid.

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.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

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.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Man is the only animal that knows nothing and can learn nothing without being taught.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Resolve your mental energy into abstraction, your physical energy into inaction. Allow yourself to fall in with the natural order of phenomena, without admitting the element of self,—and the empire will be governed.