If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.
What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.
I don’t like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God’s.
The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
Mirth is the sweet wine of human life. It should be offered sparkling with zestful life unto God.
Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.
A grindstone that had not grit in it, how long would it take to sharpen an ax? And affairs that had not grit in them, how long would they take to make a man?
Grim care, moroseness, anxiety-all this rust of life ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. Mirth is God’s medicine.
People may excite in themselves a glow of compassion, not by toasting their feet at the fire, and saying: “Lord, teach me compassion,” but by going and seeking an object that requires compassion.
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature.
The strength of a man consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way.
I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.
Death is the dropping of the flower, that the fruit may swell.
Gambling with cards or dice or stocks is all one thing. It’s getting money without giving an equivalent for it.
Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
A church debt is the devil’s salary.
Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.