Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!
Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.
Have an open mind and an open heart. I'm not this bad person. I'm just doing what I have to do.
Follow what you are genuinely passionate about and let that guide you to your destination.
Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above, it was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
I did not get my Spaghetti-O's, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.
I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.
My dad, I still think, had the most beautiful, simple checklist for what you should do in life: Do something you really love that you would do it anyway. Do it in the most adventurous place you can do it. And make sure that it helps other people. And if you feel there's a genuine need for it, and that through that need you can help other people, you're home.
For all intents and purposes, I am a woman.
Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.
I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
Those who work standing ... carpenters, sawyers, carvers, blacksmiths, masons ... are liable to varicose veins ... [because] the strain on the muscles is such that the circulation of the blood is retarded. Standing even for a short time proves exhausting compared with walking and running though it be for a long time ... Nature delights and is restored by alternating and varied actions.
"She's a very charming and delightful creature," quoth Mr. Robert Sawyer, in reply; "and has only one fault that I know of, Ben. It happens, unfortunately, that that single blemish is a want of taste. She don't like me."
All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.
or simply:
