James Richardson Best Quotes & Sayings

The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it. — James Richardson

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

Patience is decisive indecision. — James Richardson

The god of many cannot remain the true god. — James Richardson

Too much apology doubles the offense. — James Richardson

Nothing important comes with instructions. — James Richardson

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

Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into. — James Richardson

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? — James Richardson

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. — James Richardson

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life. — James Richardson

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

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

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

The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of. — James Richardson

Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step ... Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt. — James Richardson

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

The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn't. — James Richardson

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

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree. — James Richardson

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly. — James Richardson

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on? — James Richardson

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. — James Richardson

All work is the avoidance of harder work. — James Richardson

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter. — James Boswell

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

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

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

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. — James Richardson

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. — James Richardson

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. — James Richardson

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

Sophistication is upscale conformity. — James Richardson

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. — James Richardson

If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time. — James Richardson

To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe. — James Richardson