"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 little better; whether be 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 the meaning of success."

"Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never."

"We acquire the strength we have overcome."

"Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not."

"I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow."

"Character is what can do without success."

"I wish to say what I think and feel today with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all."

"No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere."

"The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom."

"Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock."

"If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

"The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood."

"Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom."

"Man is a piece of the universe made alive."

"The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode."

"What is success? 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 That is to have succeeded."

"All the great speakers were bad speakers at first."

"Every man I meet is in some way my superior."

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken."

"When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world I thank God I am alive."

"Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim."

"Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved."

"Though I am weak yet God when prayed Cannot withhold his conquering aid."

"In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,-some of them,-and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,-not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike."

"Make yourself necessary to somebody."

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."

"Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown."

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."

"We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."

"I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast."

"God enters by a private door into every individual."

"We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! - it seems to say, - there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power."

"You have first an instinct then an opinion then a knowledge as the plant has root bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end though you can render no reason."

"Trust the instinct to the end though you can render no reason."

"If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest."

"Whatever you do you need courage. ... To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs."

"Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path."

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next."

"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."

"The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else."

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."

"A man in debt is so far a slave."

"A man is what he thinks about all day long."

"It is not length of life, but depth of life."

"Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations."

"Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"

"The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving."

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."

"Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use."

"I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature."