Top 70 James Richardson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nothing important comes with instructions.”

— James Richardson

2. “If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.”

— James Richardson

3. “Water deepens where it has to wait.”

— James Richardson

4. “The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.”

— James Richardson

5. “The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.”

— James Richardson

6. “Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.”

— James Richardson

7. “To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.”

— James Richardson

8. “Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.”

— James Richardson

9. “The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.”

— James Richardson

10. “Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.”

— James Richardson

11. “Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.”

— James Richardson

12. “To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.”

— James Richardson

13. “The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.”

— James Richardson

14. “It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.”

— James Richardson

15. “Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.”

— James Richardson

16. “Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.”

— James Richardson

17. “Happiness is the readiness to be happy.”

— James Richardson

18. “There are silences harder to take back than words.”

— James Richardson

19. “Patience is decisive indecision.”

— James Richardson

20. “Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink.”

— James Richardson

21. “Here in the last minutes, the very end of the world, someone’s tightening a screw thinner than an eyelash, someone with slim wrists is straightening flowers...”

— James Richardson

22. “Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.”

— James Richardson

23. “If you do more than your share you’d better want to: otherwise, you’re paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.”

— James Richardson

24. “Too much apology doubles the offense.”

— James Richardson

25. “Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?”

— James Richardson

26. “I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.”

— James Richardson

27. “God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.”

— James Richardson

28. “Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.”

— James Richardson

29. “You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don’t.”

— James Richardson

30. “Sophistication is upscale conformity.”

— James Richardson

31. “All work is the avoidance of harder work.”

— James Richardson

32. “Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.”

— James Richardson

33. “There is no road to the land without roads.”

— James Richardson

34. “I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back.”

— James Richardson

35. “So many times I’ve made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.”

— James Richardson

36. “The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.”

— James Richardson

37. “Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.”

— James Richardson

38. “Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.”

— James Richardson

39. “I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.”

— James Richardson

40. “It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?”

— James Richardson

41. “I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.”

— James Richardson

42. “The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn’t.”

— James Richardson

43. “If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.”

— James Richardson

44. “That others know: science. That others choose: politics.”

— James Richardson

45. “How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.”

— James Richardson

46. “Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.”

— James Richardson

47. “What is more yours than what always holds you back?”

— James Richardson

48. “How sure we are that everyone’s watching. How sure we are that no one sees.”

— James Richardson

49. “On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.”

— James Richardson

50. “Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.”

— James Richardson