It is written in the very structure of the brain that each impression of the senses must bring with it the impulse to act.
One of the few things that we may know in life is this, that it is impossible for man to know anything absolutely.
To reach for the ultimate end of action is never to begin to act.
Greater sensitiveness to external things means greater capacity for pain, hence greater suffering, when the natural channels of effort are closed.
That the joys thus produced had no real objective existence, man was not long in finding out, and it soon appeared that for each subjective pleasure which had no foundation in action, there was a subjective sorrow, likewise unrelated to external things.
What, then, are you doing under these blue skies? The thing you do should be for you the most important thing in the world.
It does not matter if the greatest thing for you to do be not in itself great. The best preparation for greatness comes in doing faithfully the little things that lie nearest. The nearest is the greatest in most human lives.
It is not that "I come like water and like wind I go." I am here today, and the moment and the place are real, and my will is itself one of the fates that make and unmake all things.
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
The book was written by David Starr Jordan.
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