“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”
“Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.”
“Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!”
“Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.”
“The person who cannot laugh is not only ready for treason, and deceptions, their whole life is already a treason and deception.”
“A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.”
“Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.”
“In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.”
“Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”
“For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.”
“No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.”
“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.”
“Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.”
“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.”
“Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.”
“What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?”
“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.”
“In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.”
“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.”
“What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.”
“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.”
“Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of a man you are. It shows me what your ideal of manhood is, and what kind of a man you long to be.”
“If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... ''Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.''”
“Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.”
“Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.”
“After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.”
“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.”
“Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.”
“The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.”
“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.”