James Richardson

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

"Water deepens where it has to wait."

"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?"

"Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand."

"He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might."

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

"First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need."

"It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules."

"The new gets old much faster than the old gets older."

"The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be."

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

"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."

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

"I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true."

"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."

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

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

"What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?"

"Anger has been ready to be angry."

"Bitterness is a greater failure than failure."

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

"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."

"Patience is decisive indecision."

"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."

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

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

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

"Birds of prey don’t sing."

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

"Path: where nothing grows."

"Yet sadly we feel that many of the noisiest are more interested in their indignation than in the injustice."

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

"Happiness is the readiness to be happy."

"He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself."

"There is no road to the land without roads."

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

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

"I worked so hard to understand it that it must be true."

"he’s so philosophical, his approach to thinking about time, and what will last."

"I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot."