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.
Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love.
Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life.
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.
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.