Books are the ammunition of life.
It is never worth while to absolutely exhaust one’s self or to take big chances unless for an adequate object.
With soul of flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us.
I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.
Any man who has met with success, if he will be frank with himself, must admit that there has been a big element of fortune in the success.
Only those who live and sleep in the open fully realize the beauty of dawn and moonlight and starlight.
The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.
Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt.
Again, it was proposed that we should go up the mountains and make our camps there.
I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.
The existence of any method, standard, custom or practice is no reason for its continuance when a better is offered.
There must be absolute religious liberty, for tyranny and intolerance are as abhorrent in matters intellectual and spiritual as in matters political and material; and more and more we must all realize that conduct is of infinitely greater importance than dogma.
I then held, and now hold, the belief that a man’s first duty is to pull his own weight and to take care of those dependent upon him; and I then believed, and now believe, that the greatest privilege and greatest duty for any man is to be happily married, and that no other form of success or service, for either man or woman, can be wisely accepted as a substitute or alternative.
Father is strength at home, strength in government and strength overseas. Mother represents upbringing, education, the spread of civilization. Children are the lower classes, the lower races, to be brought to maturity and then set free.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.
Let these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy the laws.
To educate a person without teaching ethics is to create a menace to society.
Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.
The problems differ from generation to generation, but the qualities needed to solve them remain unchanged from world’s end to world’s end.
There! you will think this a dreadfully preaching letter! I suppose I have a natural tendency to preach just at present because I am overwhelmed with my work.