"Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone."

"Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness."

"Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious."

"Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another."

"Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy."

"Wonder is the basis of worship."

"True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper."

"The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest."

"Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer."

"Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."

"The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being."

"Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity."

"Give me a man who sings at his work."

"The present is the living sum-total of the whole past."

"He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years."

"Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is."

"No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad."

"History is the essence of innumerable biographies."

"Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are."

"One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities."

"I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil."

"Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!"

"The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then."

"Let each become all that he was created capable of being."

"Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong."

"Debt is a bottomless sea."

"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it."

"All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew."

"The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem."

"The spiritual is the parent of the practical."

"Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will."

"Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come."

"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."

"It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five."

"Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall."

"History a distillation of rumor."

"Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together."

"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."

"Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope."

"Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world."

"Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with."

"History, a distillation of rumour."

"Necessity dispenseth with decorum."

"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."

"The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity."

"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."

"Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die."

"No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

"If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music."

"Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books."