Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.
A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.
The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.
Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.
Wise man was he who counselled that speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever and howsoever it listed.
With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
The true eye for talent presupposes the true reverence for it.
Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth.
In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce, – he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
Time has only a relative existence.
Blessed be the God’s voice; for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!
No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.
One is weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine man, it is not evil to be poor.
They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.
Goethe’s devil is a cultivated personage and acquainted with the modern sciences; sneers at witchcraft and the black art even while employing them, and doubts most things, nay, half disbelieves even his own existence.
Leaders: Captains of industry.
There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
A collection of books is the best of all universities.
Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.