Wake Up and Live

He can seldom be counted on for impromptu gaieties, since he is not unconsciously intent on finding any escape at all from the unsatisfactory conditions of his life. And, since he has none of the deep interior guilt that haunts the one who knows he is failing, he is under no compulsion to be winning. He reserves his humor and charm, his emotion and indulgence, for those whose lives are closely bound up with his by his own choice. So, except among his real intimates, he may have the name of being gruff and unapproachable, or too coolly civil

they failed to take into account the generosity of love

The successful man has less free time, and observes more punctiliously his self-set hours for withdrawing from companionship, than the failure

So it is worth understanding that if you fail you are rewarded by not running the risk of getting hot and tired and discouraged, or sharp-tempered when your co-workers or your materials, whatever they are, seem more refractory than usual.

roast pigs do not run about crying “Eat me!” Fruit does not fall from the trees into our mouths.

if we are not doing what we are best equipped to do, or doing well what we have undertaken as our personal contribution to the world’s work, at least by way of an earnestly followed avocation, there will be a core of unhappiness in our lives which will be more and more difficult to ignore as the years pass.

Next, still among the inconspicuous failures, the “introverts,” are the waking sleepers: persons who allow some activity to pass before them almost without participation, or indulge in time-killing pursuits in which they take only the most minor and unconstructive parts: the solitaire-players, the pathological bookworms, the endless crossword puzzlers, the jigsaw puzzle contingent. The line between recreation and obsession is not hard to see once we know it is there.

“Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live,” Marcus Aurelius warned himself in his maxims. All those in the grip of the Will to Fail act as if they had a thousand years before them. Whether they dream or dance, they spend their precious hours as though the store of them were inexhaustible.

All the equipment needed is imagination and the willingness to disturb old habit-patterns

the first step in turning from’ failure to success. We cannot begin by ignoring it, for then it can get in its subversive work most subtly. We must face it first, and then turn ourselves away from it.