Fourteen
For myself, I have never valued work for its own sake, and I never shall.
Fifteen
Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labour is immense.
Sixteen
All who look into their experience will admit that the failure to replace old habits by new ones is due to the fact that at the critical moment the brain does not remember; it simply forgets.
Seventeen
Many writers, and many clever writers, use the art of literature merely to gain an end which is connected with some different art, or with no art. Such a writer, finding himself burdened with a message prophetic, didactic, or reforming, discovers suddenly that he has the imaginative gift, and makes his imagination the servant of his intellect, or of emotions which are not artistic emotions.
Eighteen
I only value mental work for the more full and more intense consciousness of being alive which it gives me.