Echoes

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

We are here to add what we can to, not to get what we can from, Life.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight; that he shall not be a mere passenger, but shall do his share in the work that each generation of us finds ready to hand; and, furthermore, that in doing his work he shall show, not only the capacity for sturdy self-help, but also self-respecting regard for the rights of others.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

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

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, honorable, compassionate.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf.

Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

Understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

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.

To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, to make use of our organs, senses, faculties — of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.