We judge of man’s wisdom by his hope.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

The years teach much which the days never know. 

What you are comes to you.

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Sprinkle joy.

Truth is our element.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. 

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.

The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

‘This not important how the hero does this or that, but what he is.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can.

Every really able man, in whatever direction he work,—a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter,—if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate.

The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard and money not scarce?

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. 

He who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

It is the duty of men to judge men only by their actions. Our faculties furnish us with no means of arriving at the motive, the character, the secret self. We call the tree good from its fruits, and the man, from his works.

An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.

The thing done avails, and not what is said about it.

For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.