James Richardson Quotes

#1. The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

James Richardson

#2. Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.

James Richardson

#3. The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#5. Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

James Richardson

#6. 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

#7. Happiness is the readiness to be happy.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#9. 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.

James Richardson

#10. So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.

James Richardson

#11. The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.

James Richardson

#12. The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#14. Sophistication is upscale conformity.

James Richardson

#15. As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going

James Richardson

#16. The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

James Richardson

#17. How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.

James Richardson

#18. Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.

James Richardson

#19. Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.

James Richardson

#20. 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.

James Richardson

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.

James Richardson

#25. A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.

James Richardson

#26. Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.

James Richardson

#27. It's amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?

James Richardson

#28. All work is the avoidance of harder work.

James Richardson

#29. There are silences harder to take back than words.

James Richardson

#30. The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn't.

James Richardson

#31. God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.

James Richardson

#32. The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

James Richardson

#33. I worked so hard to understand it that it must be true.

James Richardson

#34. Water deepens where it has to wait.

James Richardson

#35. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.

James Richardson

#36. Nothing important comes with instructions.

James Richardson

#37. What I'm not changes more than what I am.

James Richardson

#38. Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

James Richardson

#39. The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#41. Patience is decisive indecision.

James Richardson

#42. If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.

James Richardson

#43. Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.

James Richardson

#44. If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.

James Richardson

#45. Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.

James Richardson

#46. Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.

James Richardson

#47. Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.

James Richardson

#48. Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#50. I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.

James Richardson

#51. I'll buy that means also I believe it.

James Richardson

#52. It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

James Richardson

#53. Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

James Richardson

#54. I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.

James Richardson

#55. Too much apology doubles the offense.

James Richardson

#56. There are crimes I don't commit mainly because I don't want to find out I could.

James Richardson

#57. On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

James Richardson

#58. What is more yours than what always holds you back?

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#60. To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe.

James Richardson

#61. Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.

James Richardson

#62. You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.

James Richardson

#63. A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

James Richardson

#64. 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

#65. That others know: science. That others choose: politics.

James Richardson

#66. 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

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

James Richardson

#68. I'm sitting here bored, ... trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery.

James Richardson

#69. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#71. Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we'd prefer a different drink.

James Richardson

#72. There is no road to the land without roads.

James Richardson

#73. I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#75. Anger has been ready to be angry.

James Richardson

#76. Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone's tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers ...

James Richardson

#77. Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't understand.

James Richardson

#78. To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.

James Richardson

#79. 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

#80. The god of many cannot remain the true god.

James Richardson

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

James Richardson

#82. Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.

James Richardson

#83. 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