The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.
What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it.
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature’s own heart – all else is wind in comparison.
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.
Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
A man lives by believing something.
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
True friends, like ivy and the wall Both stand together, and together fall.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.