Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.”

– William James

This world is but a winery,
Its host and master Father Time,
Who caters only to those steep’d
In dreams discordant, without rhyme.

For people drink and race as though
They were the steeds of mad desire;
Thus some are blatant when they pray,
And others frenzied to acquire.

Few on this earth who savor life,
And are not bor’d by its free gifts;
Or divert not its streams to cups
In which their fancy floats and drifts.

Should you then find a sober soul
Amidst this state of revelry,
Marvel how a moon did find
In this rain cloud a canopy.

– Khalil Gibran

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

– Socrates

“As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest.”

– Mark Twain