Related:

• In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life
  uch are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds....
• Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own. -- Thoreau
• Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
  Henry David Thoreau...
• He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.
  -- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)...
• He who sits on the pinnacle of power is still sitting on his own backside
• Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknow
  Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own....
• You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God
  a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim -- the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity....
• They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man.
  These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more....
• A gentleman is a man who can support his own weight on his hands.