On Exhaustion

"I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely."

Sherlock Holmes
From Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

On Endings ... Or Beginnings?

"Where is the beginning of the end that comes at the end of the beginning?"

Kozma Prutkov

(... but not really. Prutkov was a satirical pen name employed by Leo Tolstoy and his cousins.)

On Contradiction

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance