Life simply is will to power.
Is not life a hundred times too short - for boredom?
There had often been Jeremiahs in the [Princeton] applicant pool. They were attractive to the faculty, who some years earlier had flatly asked for more of them: fewer golden kids who did everything well, please, and more awkward kids who were brilliant but couldn't tie their shoes. The faculty themselves, she suspected, had once been awkward, brilliant kids who couldn't tie their shoes.
[Written in 1886] The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for dominion of the earth - the compulsion to large-scale politics.
There was no overt or subtle condemnation. She was [my mother] Vivian Baxter Jackson. Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.
Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure: it was the masterpiece of English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English begin unconsciously to lust again for their work- and week-day.
"Do you want to marry him?"
"No."
"Does he want to marry you?" The father had stopped speaking to me during my fourth month.
"No."
"Well, that's that. No use ruining three lives."
In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired.
In order to be profoundly dishonest, a person must have one of two qualities: either he is unscrupulously ambitious, or he is unswervingly egocentric.
The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.
That's what you want to do? Then nothing beats a trial but a failure. Give it everything you've got. I've told you many times, Can't Do is like Don't Care. Neither of them have a home.
It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author - and not to learn it better.
Occasionally we were taken to Chinese restaurants or Italian pizza parlors. We were introduced to Hungarian goulash and Irish stew. Through food we learned that there were other people in the world.
Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuine religious life requires a leisure class?
Both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault. They are both in the wrong. True course is not to wager at all.
Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.
He's Italian. Don't good Italian boys learn how to cook at about the same time they start breathing?
The duties that fell to all organisms ... locomotion, digestion, elimination, respiration, and reproduction, and he couldn't remember the rest. ... Pay their taxes, probably. Learn to dance.
What is time but the stuff delay is made of?
Henry David Thoreau
The trouble with doing nothing is you never know when you're finished.
