James Richardson Quotations

When I looked at that young man, I saw someone who could have a second chance to rehabilitate himself and come out and be a powerful -- and I mean a powerful -- member of society, but most of all, a powerful servant of God. That's what I saw,

We're all squished in trying to figure out how to make it work.

We had some hot buttons we couldn't agree on. We gave the mayor too much power. The mayor would have veto power and sit on the council and vote. I was afraid that our city manager would feel like she was being micromanaged by the mayor.

We are suggesting the factory itself will support 1,527 direct and indirect jobs with an annual impact of $51.5 million.

The weaker the intellect, the stronger the belief

It's a great privilege for us to have this group come and assist us,

Every attempt is a success. Failure is letting any chance to try go by.

It kind of opened up people's minds to different things. People are learning what different materials do and are experimenting more.

I learned a lot from it, but I would not do anything different because I believe in the process.

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

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.

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

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

There is no road to the land without roads.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.

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

Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.

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

The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Patience is decisive indecision.

Happiness is the readiness to be happy.

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

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.

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

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

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

Too much apology doubles the offense.

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

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.

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

The god of many cannot remain the true god.

Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.

I'll buy that means also I believe it.

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

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

Water deepens where it has to wait.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

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?

Sophistication is upscale conformity.

If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.

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

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.

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

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

Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.

All work is the avoidance of harder work.

There are silences harder to take back than words.

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

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

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

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

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

On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.

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

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

Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

What is more yours than what always holds you back?

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

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

Nothing important comes with instructions.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

The high price of fuel and fertilizer has played a significant factor in net returns to farmers. This will cause many farmers across the country to look for new ways to cut costs while maintaining yields.

And I'm just a firm believer, if God can forgive me all the stuff I've done, then why can't I forgive somebody else?