“Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.”
Quote collection
Thinking Quotes — page 963 of 4756
“The fact that tradition hinders the individual savage from thinking logically by no means proves that he cannot think logically.”
“Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.”
“What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.”
“The coward wants resolution, which the brave man can do without. He recognizes no faith above a creed, thinking this straw by which he is moored does him good service, because his sheet anchor does not drag.”
“Do not engage to find things as you think they are.”
“See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
“As a man thinks of himself, so he is.”
“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however, ancient, can be trusted without proof. ... Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
“Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable;even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?”
“I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations.”
“We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.”
“I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.”
“Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.”
“My Friend is that one whom I can associate with my choicest thought.”
“Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good.”
“Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.”
“I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.”
“For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.”
“As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.”