The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.
The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties. This exercise must occupy a complete lifetime. One swallow does make a spring, nor does one fine day. Excellence is a habit, not an event.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
pay attention to what I eat and to how I balance that with physical and mental exercise. The same way I want to spend time filling my mind with the best information I can acquire from the best sources I can obtain, I also want to consume nourishment from the best sources for my body.
Whatever discipline you exercise should be based on the goal your child is eventually to reach, namely, freedom and happiness. I would show him towards what he is growing, his ultimate fulfilment, and help him to adapt himself to that. In everything that you do, you should keep the goal in view, and hence your discipline must aim at helping the child to realize that at a certain stage he will be above all discipline.
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.
Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.
A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.