Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle.
As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new -- and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.
Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime . Not failure, but low aim is crime.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
The question of common sense is what is it good for? A question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.
Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise ;in statesmanship.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.
Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
Democracy give every man the right to be his own oppressor.
To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.
Sorrow is the great idealizer.
The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.
Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.
The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.
The idol is the measure of the worshipper.
Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
Light is the symbol of truth.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
The foolish and the dead never change their opinions.
Endurance is the crowning quality...
The eye is the notebook of the poet.
The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.
What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.
An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual.
A reading machine, always wound up and going, he mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.
Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.
Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.
Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
Every person born into this world their work is born with them.
If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.