Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

Time is money.

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

A little over 5% of the world’s population produces almost 29% of the world’s goods and services.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

Just on a practical side, if you wake up early in the morning – like at 4:30 in the morning – you’re going to have some free time to yourself to make things happen, to take care of things that are important to you.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Do Lipton employees take coffee breaks?

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

The lie is a condition of life.

I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.

Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

Living animals are too eccentric in their movements, and the law of gravitation usually draws me from my seat upon them to a lower level; therefore, I am not an inveterate lover of horseback.

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.