There are few chapters in the biography of the childhood of men of genius more significant than those which describe imaginary worlds which were, for a time, as real as the actual world in which the boy lived.
Don’t be afraid of opposition. Remember, a kite rises against, not with, the wind.
The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.
To have a quiet mind is to possess one’s mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one’s self.
Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary.
Nothing is lost upon a man who is bent upon growth; nothing wasted on one who is always preparing for – life by keeping eyes, mind and heart open to nature, men, books, experience – and what he gathers serves him at unexpected moments in unforeseen ways.
He strains his conversation through a cigar.
A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace.
The test of friendship is its fidelity when every charm of fortune and environment has been spent away, and the bare, undraped character alone remains; if love still holds steadfast, and the joy of companionship survives in such an hour, the fellowship becomes a beautiful prophecy of immortality.
The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.
It is better to go down on the great seas which human hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in ignoble anchorage.
A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.
Real freedom comes from the mastery, through knowledge, of historic conditions and race character, which makes possible a free and intelligent use of experience for the purpose of progress.
There is no kind obondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength; and nothing reveals a man’s character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.
The germs of all truth lie in the soul, and when the ripe moment comes, the truth within answers to the fact without as the flower responds to the sun, giving it form for heat and color for light.
Art involves forgetfulness of immediate ends; complete surrender to the inward impulse to give form to the beautiful idea or image of truth because it is beautiful.
Oh, if I only had a little child, I should like it to be as fair as snow, as rosy as the red blood, and with hair and eyes as black as ebony.
We would not give it thee for all the gold in the world.
The myths record the earliest attempt at an explanation of the world and its life; the fairy tale records the free and joyful play of the imagination, opening doors through hard conditions to the spirit, which craves power, freedom, happiness; righting wrongs and redressing injuries; defeating base designs; rewarding patience and virtue; crowning true love with happiness;.
The fairy tale belongs to the child and ought always to be within his reach, not only because it is his special literary form and his nature craves it, but because it is one of the most vital of the textbooks offered to him in the school of life. In ultimate importance it outranks the arithmetic, the grammar, the geography, the manuals of science; for without the aid of the imagination none of these books is really comprehensible.