Echoes

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

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.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

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

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

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

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

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

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.

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.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

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

I believe people work for satisfaction.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

There are two kinds of pleasure: one consisting in a state of rest, in which both body and mind are undisturbed by any kind of pain; the other arising from an agreeable agitation of the senses, producing a correspondent emotion in the soul. It is upon the former of these that the enjoyment of life chiefly depends. Happiness may therefore be said to consist in bodily ease, and mental tranquility.

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

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

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

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear, that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. "What is this Truth you seek? What is this Beauty?" men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, "As others do, so will I. I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season." — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history; and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. ... Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in Nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom.