James Richardson Quotes (89 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

James Richardson: 89 quotes6 likes

Famous James Richardson Quotes

“Happiness is the readiness to be happy.”

Aphorism #33
Interglacial (2004)

“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

#127
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#92
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Water deepens where it has to wait.”

James Richardson

#224
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.”

James Richardson

#440
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules.”

James Richardson

#326
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

James Richardson Quotes about thinking

“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

#48
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#108
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.”

James Richardson

#126
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#454
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#405
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“To think yourself incapable of crime is one failure of the imagination. To think yourself capable of all crimes is another.”

James Richardson

#122
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

James Richardson Quotes about time

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

James Richardson

#407
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.”

James Richardson

#146
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“So many times I’ve made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.”

James Richardson

#105
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.”

James Richardson

#151
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #115
Interglacial (2004)

James Richardson: Trending quotes

“Often you only have to ask What would I do if I were not afraid?”

James Richardson

#121
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need.”

James Richardson

#314
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#100
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

James Richardson Quotes

“Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.”

James Richardson

#166
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.”

James Richardson

#147
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#107
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The great consolation of righteousness is never having to worry whether you’re a bore.”

James Richardson

#85
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #27
Interglacial (2004)

“That others know: science. That others choose: politics.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #112
Interglacial (2004)

“Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.”

James Richardson

#157
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#247
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.”

James Richardson

#55
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#295
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #10
Interglacial (2004)

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

James Richardson

#431
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.”

James Richardson

#16
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#398
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.”

James Richardson

#64
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The viruses that co-opt the machinery of our cells; the stories we allow to enter and explain us.”

James Richardson

#27
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#373
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.”

James Richardson

#1
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Yet sadly we feel that many of the noisiest are more interested in their indignation than in the injustice.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #22
Interglacial (2004)

“On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.”

James Richardson

#75
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#412
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#465
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“I’ll buy that means also I believe it.”

James Richardson

#157
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Only the dead have discovered what they cannot live without.”

James Richardson

#120
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.”

James Richardson

#112
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.”

James Richardson

#348
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#349
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“There are crimes I don’t commit mainly because I don’t want to find out I could.”

James Richardson

#124
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.”

James Richardson

#163
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.”

James Richardson

#251
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.”

James Richardson

#114
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself.”

James Richardson

Aphorism #98
Interglacial (2004)

“He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might.”

James Richardson

#293
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.”

James Richardson

#170
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#449
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Patience is decisive indecision.”

James Richardson

#451
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.”

James Richardson

#135
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“What did you do today? Nothing say our little children, and so do I. What we most are is what we keep mistaking for nothing.”

James Richardson

#155
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#146
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Anger has been ready to be angry.”

James Richardson

#438
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The god of many cannot remain the true god.”

James Richardson

#138
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#403
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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

James Richardson

#52
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe.”

James Richardson

#171
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The tyrant puts down his own rebellion, everywhere.”

James Richardson

#77
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“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

#150
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.”

James Richardson

#165
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“The single sin is less of a problem than the good reasons for it.”

James Richardson

#84
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.”

James Richardson

#197
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“If you do everything for one reason, then all you have done will become meaningless when the reason does.”

James Richardson

#41
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

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