Mental Efficiency quotes

In three weeks my collars would not meet round my prize-fighter's neck; my hosier reaped immense profits, and I came to the conclusion that I had carried physical efficiency quite far enough.

A strange thing—was it not?—that I never had the idea of devoting a quarter of an hour a day after shaving to the pursuit of mental efficiency.

The average body is a pretty complicated affair, sadly out of order, but happily susceptible to culture. The average mind is vastly more complicated, not less sadly out of order, but perhaps even more susceptible to culture.

More often than not I have found that a task willed in some hour of insight can not be fulfilled through hours of gloom. No, no, and no!

To will is easy: it needs but the momentary bright contagion of a stronger spirit than one's own.

To fulfil, morning after morning, or evening after evening, through months and years—this is the very dickens, and there is not one of my readers that will not agree with me.

Yes, my friend, in the breast of your mother. The only difference between your mother and another person is that she takes you as you are, and loves you for what you are. She isn't blind: do not imagine it.

The marvel is, not that people are such bad judges of character, but that they are such good judges, especially of what I may call fundamental character.

The wiliest person cannot for ever conceal his fundamental character from the simplest. And people are very stern judges, too. Think of your best friends—are you oblivious of their defects? On the contrary, you are perhaps too conscious of them.

I hear you say that kindliness of heart can be "cultivated." Well, I hate to have even the appearance of contradicting you, but it can only be cultivated in the botanical sense.

You can't cultivate violets on a nettle.

A philosopher has enjoined us to suffer fools gladly. He had more usefully enjoined us to suffer ill-natured persons gladly.... I see that in a fit of absentmindedness I have strayed into the pulpit. I descend.

Surely you are not so naïve as to imagine that the road on the other side of that hill there is more beautiful than the piece you are now traversing! Hopes are never realized; for in the act of realization they become something else.

Ambitions may be attained, but ambitions attained are rather like burnt coal, ninety per cent. of the heat generated has gone up the chimney instead of into the room.

Nevertheless, indulge in hopes and ambitions, which, though deceiving, are agreeable deceptions; let them cheat you a little, a lot. But do not let them cheat you too much.

In most of you the first instinct has simply got the other by the throat and is throttling it.

Prepare to live by all means, but for heaven's sake do not forget to live.

You will never have a better chance than you have at present. You may think you will have, but you are mistaken. Pardon this bluntness.

(Berkeley, even thy turn may come!)

In short, I want them because I want them.

And shall I be deterred from possessing them by the fear of some sequestered and singular person, some person who has read vastly but who doesn't know the difference between a J.S. Muria cigar and an R.P.

Successful men forget so much of their lives! Moreover, nothing is easier than to explain an accomplished fact in a nice, agreeable, conventional way.

The entire business of success is a gigantic tacit conspiracy on the part of the minority to deceive the majority.

Are successful men more industrious, frugal, and intelligent than men who are not successful? I maintain that they are not, and I have studied successful men at close quarters.

… is written in, and make expert reflections upon its form, and catalogue its themes, and relate it to symphonies that preceded it and symphonies that followed it, but in the end one is reduced to saying that the C minor symphony is beautiful—because it is.

In the same manner one is reduced to saying that the sole real difference between success and failure is that success succeeds.

This being frankly admitted at the outset, I will allow myself to assert that there are three sorts of success. Success A is the accidental sort. It is due to the thing we call chance, and to nothing else.

What they think they object to is artificialities of any kind, and so to get rid of their spleen they refer to "petty" artificialities. The device is a common one, and as brilliant as it is futile.

Rude adjectives are like blank cartridge.

They impress a vain people, including the birds of the air, but they do no execution.

The fault of the epoch is the absence of meditativeness. A sagacious man will strive to correct in himself the faults of his epoch. In some deep ways the twelfth century had advantages over the twentieth. It practised meditation.

The twentieth does Sandow exercises.

Meditation (I speak only for myself) is the least dispensable of the day's doings. What do I force my mind to meditate upon? Upon various things, but chiefly upon one.

It is often said that no thinking person can be happy in this world.

My view is that the more a man thinks the more happy he is likely to be.

I have spoken. I am overwhelmingly aware that I have spoken crudely, abruptly, inadequately, confusedly.