James Richardson Quotes

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

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

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.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

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

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.

Water deepens where it has to wait.

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

God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

There is no road to the land without roads.

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.

Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.

If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.

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

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.

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.

Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't understand.

To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.

Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.

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

Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.

What I'm not changes more than what I am.

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

I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.

The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

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

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

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

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

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

Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.

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

Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

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.

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

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

Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers ...

Nothing important comes with instructions.

Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.

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

Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions:
are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?

I'll buy that means also I believe it.

To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.

To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.