If a man is after money, he's money mad; if he keeps it, he's a capitalist; if he spends it, he's a playboy; if he doesn't get it, he's a ne'er-do-well; if he doesn't try to get it, he lacks ambition. If he gets it without working for it; he's a parasite; and if he accumulates it after a life time of hard work, people call him a fool who never got anything out of life.
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Adults interfere with a natural biologic development of the child's motor, visual, mental, and artistic abilities when they try to influence the child's work in the early years. The adult's brain has accumulated much more visual and artistic memory than the child's, so there can be no true meeting of adult and child mind unless the adult knows how the child's mind functions in art.
Most people think happiness is about gaining something, but it's not. It's all about getting rid of the darkness you accumulate.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Just as animal research tells us that gluttony and sloth are side effects of a drive to accumulate body fat, it also says that eating in moderation and being physically active (literally, having the energy to exercise) are not evidence of moral rectitude. Rather, they're the metabolic benefits of a body that's programmed to remain lean.
No important institution is ever merely what the law makes it. It accumulates about itself traditions, conventions, ways of behaviour, which are not less formidable in their influence.
It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man's life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.
I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.