A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take for better, for worse, as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave.

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.