The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense
“Duties are what make life most worth living. Lacking them, you are not necessary to anyone.”
"A Mathematical Theory of Saving", The Economic Journal, Vol. 38, No. 152 (Dec., 1928)
“The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.”
Letter (September 1940)
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
“The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.”
Source: The Boy Detective Fails
“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”
