How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: Controlling The Mind
People say: “One can’t help one’s thoughts.” But one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the [...]

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: The Reflective Mood
The exercise of concentrating the mind (to which at least half an hour a day should be given) is a mere preliminary, like scales on the piano. Having acquired power over that most unruly member of one’s complex organism, one has naturally to put it [...]

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: Interest In The Arts
Many people pursue a regular and uninterrupted course of idleness in the evenings because they think that there is no alternative to idleness but the study of literature; and they do not happen to have a taste for literature. This is a great [...]

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: Nothing In Life Is Humdrum
Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect–in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe–in still other words, the perception [...]

How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day: Serious Reading
Novels are excluded from “serious reading,” so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason [...]