Doing Quotes (page 1014)
Lose the day loitering, 'twill be the same story. To-morrow, and the next more dilatory, For indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o'er lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or think you can, begin it! Only engage, and then the mind grows heated; Begin it, and the work will be completed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A truly good book…teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read…What I began by reading I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau
Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body; it had nothing whatsoever to do with a man's emotions. But if that was the case, why did it ache so?
Ben Elton
Look, I have no idea what's going on," I said, catching my breath. "I don't like myself either. I don't know what's happening to me. I don't want to tell you to fuck off. But you gotta understand, everything in my life feels different. I just want so badly to know if you like me. And I know how asinine that sounds. If you want me to leave you alone, I will, but sometimes... sometimes you meet somebody and you know that whatever you did before, whatever your life was before, it must have been...
Ethan Hawke
... Men do not sufficiently realizethat their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort requiredfor fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
Henri Bergson
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.
James A. Michener