Echoes

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well.

Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

A person who is said to be proficient at the arts is like a fool. Because of his foolishness in concerning himself with just one thing, he thinks of nothing else and thus becomes proficient.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; ’Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few.

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

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

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

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

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

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.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The person who has lived the most is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one with the richest experiences.

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

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.

The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

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

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Do the duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Whatever you are, be a good one.