Lord Avebury.
"A 'bustling' man is, to a man of business, what a monkey is to a man. He is the shadow of despatch, or, rather, the echo thereof; for he maketh noise enough for an alarm. The quickness of a true man of business he imitateth, imitateth excellently well, but neither his silence nor his method; and it is to be noted that he is ever most vehement about matters of no significance. He is always in such headlong haste to overtake the next minute, that he loses half the minute in hand; and yet is full of indignation and impatience at other people's slowness, and wasteth more time in reiterating his love of despatch than would suffice for doing a great deal of business. He never giveth you his quiet attention with a mind centred on what you are saying, but hears you with a restless eye, and a perpetual shifting posture, and is so eager to show his quickness that he interrupteth you a dozen times, misunderstands you as often, and ends by making you and himself lose twice as much time as was necessary."
H. Rogers.
FEBRUARY 6
"The thrift of time will repay in after life with usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning."
Gladstone.
"One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their faculty of readily determining the relative importance of different things. There are many things which it is desirable to do, a few are essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few essential things are. Life is so short and time so fleeting that much which one would wish to do must fain be omitted. He is fortunate who perceives at a glance what it will do, and what it will not do, to omit. This invaluable faculty, if not possessed in a remarkable degree naturally, is susceptible of cultivation to a considerable extent. Let any one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being done or left undone. In this way attention first to the things of first importance soon acquires the almost irresistible force of habit, and becomes a rule of life. There is no rule more indispensable to success."
FEBRUARY 7