Wisdom

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time.

We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.

The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.

You can only waste the passing moment.

So let us begin to examine the budget of the day's time.

He has a solid coin of time to spend every day—call it a sovereign.

I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.

No newspaper reading in trains!

I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness.

The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude is to me repugnant.

And when I say "the human machine" I mean the brain and the body—and chiefly the brain.

The human machine is an apparatus of brain and muscle for enabling the Ego to develop freely in the universe by which it is surrounded, without friction.

In case of friction, the machine is always at fault.

You can control nothing but your own mind.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

The Bodleian at this moment harbours within its walls well-nigh half a million of printed volumes, some scores of precious manuscripts in all the tongues, and has become a name famous throughout the whole civilized world.

A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.

It is perhaps best not to make too great demands upon our slender stock of deep emotions.

Sir Thomas Bodley's Library at Oxford is, all will admit, a great and glorious institution, one of England's sacred places.

It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.