James Richardson quotes:

I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.

Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

Nothing important comes with instructions.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.

A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.

It's amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions:

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There are silences harder to take back than words.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

I'll buy that means also I believe it.

Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

Water deepens where it has to wait.

Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.

Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.

To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.

I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

The god of many cannot remain the true god.

Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren't hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.

Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.

I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.

Too much apology doubles the offense.

The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn't.

They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.

The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.

Happiness is the readiness to be happy.

Patience is decisive indecision.

Hasn't there ... been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.

Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.

Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't understand.

To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe.

To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.

Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.

If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.

Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.

Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.

Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.

What I'm not changes more than what I am.

Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.

Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step. ... Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt.

Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.

That others know: science. That others choose: politics.

There is no road to the land without roads.

Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we'd prefer a different drink.

I'm sitting here bored, ... trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery.

The drives were nature's first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world's obstacles to them.

There are crimes I don't commit mainly because I don't want to find out I could.

So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.

What's thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn't known was there.

Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.