"A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus."

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

"Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world."

"In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment."

"The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion."

"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."

"Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim."

"To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself."

"I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

"The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect."

"Worship is transcendent wonder."

"If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown."

"His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps."

"The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god"."

"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."

"Thought is the parent of the deed."

"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."

"If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else."

"Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him."

"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen."

"Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero."

"Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."

"Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought."

"Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation."

"Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere."

"Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

"A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things."

"Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb."

"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."

"When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze."

"Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us."

"If you are ever in doubt as to whether to kiss a pretty girl, always give her the benefit of the doubt."

"Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought, underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation."

"No ghost was every seen by two pair of eyes."

"It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale."

"There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune."

"For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?"

"In books lies the soul of the whole past time."

"Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects."

"The suffering man ought really to consume his own smoke, there is no good in emitting smoke till you have made it into fire."

"No violent extreme endures."

"Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner."

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

"Speech is silvern silence is golden."

"All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word."

"Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."

"Nothing stops the man who desires to achieve. Every obstacle is simply a course to develop his achievement muscle. It's a strengthening of his powers of accomplishment."

"A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."

"No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve."

"Of a truth men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."