All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

Recommended reading: Selected Letters of James Joyce.

If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Recommended reading: Bruce Lee: Artist of Life.

What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life. The hours are appointed and named… Life’s fretfulness is transcended. The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers… And if you have no ceremony, no habits, which may be opulent or may be simple but are exact and rigorous and familiar, how can you reach toward the actuality of faith, or even a moral life, except vaguely? The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us. Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real.

Recommended reading: Long Life. 

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

Recommended reading: Mere Christianity.

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.

Recommended reading: A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh.

 

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

Recommended reading: Think and Grow Rich.

When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word? Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love. If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears — disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you’re talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you’ve got to talk about love… And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It’s almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it’s really coming out of our deepest physiological nature.

Recommended reading: Lost in America: A Journey with My Father.

There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.

Recommended reading: Indira Gandhi: Daughter of India.

All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.

Recommended reading: For One More Day.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Recommended reading: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.