James Bryce Quotes

Life is too short to waste time on books that end badly

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

You spend your time like you spend money. You can waste it or invest it.

As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.

Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.'

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

In promotional mode, every day is a series of decisions. You can easily fill up your day with checklist stuff.

You can make more money - you can buy a new body - but you can't buy time. If you are wasting it, make different choices. Don't wait.

I get most of my reading done whenever I'm in the airport waiting on a flight, have some time to kill, and I have a book with me.

I used to spend my time more on process than strategy. Now, I prioritize my time around strategy, people, and process.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

I want to work, but I certainly am not going to be clawing at empty things when I can completely fill up my bucket with them - the other is a waste of my time.

You have to ruthlessly prioritize.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

I'm preprogrammed emotionally and intellectually not to go down blind alleys. I don't waste the time. I automatically edit out whatever's impractical.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

It is not true that people who accomplish things don't waste time and that people who waste time don't accomplish things. The very concept is ill-informed. You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

Things not worth doing are not worth doing well.

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good.

Decisions are made by people who have time, not people who have talent.