For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.
He that can work is born to be king of something.
Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.
No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.
It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Wonder is the basis of worship.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
The first sin in our universe was Lucifer’s self conceit.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man’s soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.
A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.
Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.