Wenda

“No profession, trade, or calling, is overcrowded in the upper story. Wherever you find the most honest and intelligent merchant or banker, or the best lawyer, the best doctor, the best clergyman, the best shoemaker, carpenter, or anything else, that man is most sought for, and has always enough to do. As a nation, Americans are too superficial—they are striving to get rich quickly, and do not generally do their business as substantially and thoroughly as they should, but whoever excels all others in his own line, if his habits are good and his integrity undoubted, cannot fail to secure abundant patronage and the wealth that naturally follows. Let your motto then always be "Excelsior," for by living up to it there is no such word as fail”
― P.T. Barnum, Art of Getting Money in the 21st Century

“I’m afraid I don’t really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful- particularly the absolutely invincible variety, which I’ve never met or known to exist. I’m a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can’t write one line- I can’t write a word- about it.”
― Osamu Dazai, Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

“[My wife] called, "Pochi, Pochi, your supper's ready," and laughed as she said, "You may have a personality disorder.” A disgusting thought came to mind,
“They say that the dog comes to resemble its owner.”
― Osamu Dazai, The Story of a Pet Dog

“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series