Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever. – Samuel Smiles
Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only. – Samuel Smiles
The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom. – Samuel Smiles
It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application. – Samuel Smiles
Swedes are such a civilised, perfect society – at least on the surface. Theres a great safety net, a huge middle class, free education, free health care. People are very polite, they wait their turn. Theyre not too loud, theyre not too quiet, but sometimes its a little too perfect. – Alexander Skarsgard
As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body. – Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979