“You must work for yourself; for what you reject may be as important for you to have seen and thought about, as what you adopt.”
‘On the Transaction of Business’, p. 85.
Essays written in the Intervals of Business, (1841)
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Arthur Helps 17
British writer 1813–1875Related quotes

Earliest attribution found in Who Said That?: More than 2,500 Usable Quotes and Illustrations https://books.google.nl/books?id=7mn8AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT63 (1995) by George Sweeting. Online sources always attribute the quote to Augustine, but never specify in which of his works it is to be found.
Disputed

Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn

“Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.”

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.
Source: Something to Smile about: Encouragement and Inspiration for Life's Ups and Downs