Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place.
Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.
To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away, the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.
Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
The secret anniversaries of the heart.
Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.
Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings --as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.
All things must change to something new, to something strange.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.
Resolve and thou art free.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
Write on your doors the saying wise and old. Be bold! and everywhere -- Be bold; Be not too bold! Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less sustaineth him and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out.
Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery!
When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him, lies on the paths of men.
The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.
I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
Into each life some rain must fall, some days be dark and dreary.
Trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment. There is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.
Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.
One half the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.
Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.
Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.
Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.
Sail on ship of state, sail on, I union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging on thy fate!
The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, who has sight so keen and strong That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroken; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.
Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
Well has it been said that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak.
There is not grief that does not speak.
Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.
Some men must follow, and some command, though all are made of clay.
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.
It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
It is a beautiful trait in the lovers character, that they think no evil of the object loved.
Love gives itself; it is not bought.
Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature --were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.
And the night shall be filled with music, and the cares, that infest the day, shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.
A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.
It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.
Every man must patiently bide his time. He must wait -- not in listless idleness but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavors, always willing and fulfilling and accomplishing his task, that when the occasion comes he may be equal to the occasion.
All things come round to him who will but wait.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day. Their old familiar carols play. And wild and sweet the words repeat. Of peace on earth goodwill to men.
If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake somebody.
Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.
We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time.
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.
It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.
To be left alone, and face to face with my own crime, had been just retribution.
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
He that respects himself is safe from others; He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.
Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.
You know I say just what I think, and nothing more and less. I cannot say one thing and mean another.
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do.
Oh, fear not in a world like this, and thou shalt know erelong, know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.
Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow is our destined way, but to act that each tomorrow may find us further than today.
In ourselves are triumph and defeat.
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.
The human voice is the organ of the soul.
Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice.
The world loves a spice of wickedness.
Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!