Quotes About Priorities

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

The formula for achieving middle-class success is simple: Finish high school; don't have a child before the age of 20; and get married before having the child.

The best thing about being 55 is that I know enough now to know what I want and what I don't want-and what I want is to have fun.

I have friends my age who started smoking pot when they got out of college. They didn't get anywhere. But if they drank, they managed to go somewhere. Does that make sense?

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

I'd rather be poor and happy than rich and alone.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them; they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs.

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to 'need.

we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education" —and not a dime or a thought on character.

He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time;

I pursued education not instead of being a good mother, but because being a good mother required that I build a better life for my family.

My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.

you are so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband …

We had our breakfasts—whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast. When

We had our breakfast--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

he loved wisdom too much to be a "successful" man.

Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared

How little you know the age you live in, says a god in Ovid, if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.

T]he thing about someone who is escaping is this: he's more concerned about what he's leaving than what he's going to.

Did you know there are more tax breaks for video game companies than for researchers pursuing medical developments or alternate fuels?

Mostly these conversations were had over the telephone, burdened by the conceptual difficulties of conflicting priorities, generals talking to engineers, political deputies to architects.

I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.