James Richardson Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Richardson
Why would we write if we'd already heard what we wanted to hear?

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

James Richardson
Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.

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

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

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

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

James Richardson
He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself.

James Richardson
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?

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

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

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

James Richardson
Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?

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

James Richardson
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.

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

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

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

James Richardson
Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.

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

James Richardson
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.

James Richardson
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.

James Richardson
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.

James Richardson
It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it.

James Richardson