Bennet - Mental efficiency and other

• On physical excercise: "please do not form an Elaborate Programme. ..." Go small steps "you will at any rate possess the satisfaction of having resolved to do something and having done it."
• rearrange your day. Idler and timewaster though you have been, still you had done
• Robbing yourself of sleep wont help, Nor trying to "squeeze in" time
• the most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of concentrating at will.
• another excellent exercise is to read a page of no-matter-what, and then immediately to write down - in oness own words or in the authors - ones full recollection of it
• a diary treats exclusively of ones self and ones doings: a Journal roams wider and notes whatever one has observed of interest.
• Mental Efficiency can be gained by constant practice in Meditation - e.e., by concentrating the mind, say, for but ten minutes daily, but with absolute regularity, on some of the highest thoughts of which it is capable. Failures will be frequent, but they must be regarded with simple indifference.

• You are almost always shocked by the realization that you are you
• It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality

• However, the past is usually the enemy of cheerfulness
• Personally, I could even go so far as to exhibit hostility towards grief, and a marked hostility towards remorse - two states of mind which feed on the past instead of on the present.
• What one had sone, one has done, and theres an end of it.

• Hopes are never realized; for in the act of realization they become something else.
• You search for happiness? Happiness is chiefly a matter of Temperament. It is exceedingly improbably that you will by struggling gain more happiness than you already possess. In fine, settle down at once into life.

• Now, bookmen are capable of understanding things about books which cannot be put into words, they are not like mere subscribers to circulating libraries; for them a book is not just a book - it is a book.
• If these lines should happen to catch the eye of any persons not bookmen, such persons may imagine that I am writing nonsense; but I trust that the bookmen will comprehend me
• Its appearance in a series seems to me to rob a book of something very delicate and subtle in the Aroma of ist individuality - something which, it being inexplicable, I will not try to explain
• An in the third place, when one buys series, one only partially chooses oness books; they are mainly Chosen for one by the Publisher
• Not so does the genuine bookman form his library. The genuine bookman begins by having specific desires. His study of authorities gives him a deman, and the demand Forces him to find the supply. He does not let the supply create the demand.
• A library must be, primarily, the Expression of the owners personality.

• The philosophy of book-buying
• I am still walking up and down in front of my books and enjoying them without reading them.
• Are we only to buy the books that we read?
• All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read.
• I want to have lots of books on my shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a Caprice to read them. In short, I want them because I want them.

• The average man flourishes and finds his ease in an atmosphere of peaceful Routine. Men destined for success flourish and find their ease in an atmosphere of collision and disturbance.
• No one is a worse guide to success than your typical successful man
• Successful men Forget so much of their lives! Moreover, nothing is easier than to explain an accomplished fact in a nice, agreeable, conventional way
• successful seldom succeed as the result of an ordered Arrangement of their lives; they are the least methodical of creatures. Naturally, when they have "arrived" they amuse themselves and impress the majority by being convinced that right from the start, with a steady eye on the Goal, they had carefully planned every foot of the route.
• The chief of these characteristics is the continual, insatiable wish to succeed.

• In the firm consciousness that just as my Body is the servant of my mind, so is my mind the servant of me. An unruly servant, but a servant - and possibly getting less unruly every day! Often have I said to that restive brain: "Now, O mind, sole means of communication between the divine me and all external phenomena, you are not a free Agent; you are a subordinate; you are nothing but a piece of machinery; and obey me you shall.
• The mind can only be conquered by regular meditation, by deciding beforehand what direction ist activity ought to take, and insisting that ist activity takes that direction; also by never leaving it idle, undirected, masterless, to play at random like a child in the streets after dark.
• I say to my mind: "Mind, concentrate your powers upon the full realization of the fact that I, your master, am immortal and beyond the reach of accidents." And my mind, knowing by this time that I am a hard master, obediently does so.
• Am I, a Portion of the Infinite Force that existed billions of years ago, and which will exists billions of years hence, going to allow myself to be worried by any terrestrial physical or mental Event? I am not.
• Of course, I freely grant that such Meditation, while it "casts out fear", slowly kills desire and makes for a certain high indifference.

It is often said that no thinking Person can be happy in this world. My view is that the more a man thinks the more happy he is likely to be.