James Richardson Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself.

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

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

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

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

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

A strange gratitude for those I disagree with. They keep me from having to take too seriously the moments when I disagree with myself.

The god of many cannot remain the true god.