Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.
To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.
We are wiser than we know.
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
Our strength grows out of our weakness.
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns.
Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, the eternal One.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
Money often costs too much.