Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little, you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement: we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which could have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.
To hear always, to think always, to learn always, it is thus that we live truly. He who aspires to nothing, who learns nothing, is not worthy of living.
Always say a kind word if you can, if only that it may come in, perhaps, with singular opportuneness, entering some mournful man’s darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circumvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles.
It is in length of patience, endurance and forbearance that so much of what is good in mankind and womankind is shown.
Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.
The world will find out that part of your character which concerns it: that which especially concerns yourself, it will leave for you to discover.
Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.
Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.
No man has ever praised to persons equally-and pleased them both.
Pride, if not the origin, is the medium of all wickedness-the atmosphere without which it would instantly die away.
Those who never philosophized until they met with disappointments, have mostly become disappointed philosophers.
I do not know of any sure way of making others happy as being so one’s self.
People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.
It has always appeared to me, that there is so much to be done in this world, that all self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for others, is a loss – a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world.
Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice.
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?
They tell us that “Pity is akin to Love;” if so, Pity must be a poor relation.
A man’s action is only a picture book of his creed.
Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.