James Richardson may refer to:
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.
If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.
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.
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.
Too much apology doubles the offense.
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?
It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.
How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.
Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.
There are silences harder to take back than words.
Nothing important comes with instructions.
I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.
What is more yours than what always holds you back?
When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.
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.
Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.
You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.
If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.