A life well spent is long.

Leonardo da Vinci · The source reads: “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.” · From the notebooks, where he also wrote that a well spent day brings happy sleep.

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

Leonardo da Vinci · The Notebooks, I, 2

Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.

Leonardo da Vinci · The Notebooks, I, 1

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci · The Notebooks, I, 2

More Life Quotes

Usually youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise, and old age for stability and repose.

Winston Churchill · Article “Consistency in Politics”, Pall Mall, July 1927

Personal existence makes sense through the conviction of the objective value of one’s own strife and action. But if this conviction is not softened by humor, one becomes insufferable.

Albert Einstein · An aphorism sent to Johanna Fantova, 9 October 1948.

Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.

Flannery O'Connor · A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), A Late Encounter with the Enemy

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“A life well spent is long.”

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

“Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.”

“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.”

“Usually youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise, and old age for stability and repose.”

“Personal existence makes sense through the conviction of the objective value of one’s own strife and action. But if this conviction is not softened by humor, one becomes insufferable.”

“Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.”