James Richardson Quotes

Patience is decisive indecision.

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.

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

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

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

The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn’t.

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

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

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

I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.

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

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.

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

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