Echoes

Boredom is the root of all evil — the despairing refusal to be oneself.

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

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.

To see what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

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.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

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

Virtue is serious business; everything else is farce.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.

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

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

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.

To consort with the crowd is harmful; there is no person who does not make some vice attractive to us, or stamp it upon us, or taint us unconsciously therewith.

Yes, you can--if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

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

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

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

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