Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.
— Thomas Carlyle
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.
Teach a parrot the terms 'supply and demand' and you've got an economist.
Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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.
Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.
What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
The eye sees what it brings the power to see.
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.
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 man you are.
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Every noble work is at first impossible.
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
No pressure, no diamonds.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
Necessity dispenseth with decorum.
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.
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.
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
Be not a slave of words.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.
No person is important enough to make me angry.
He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.
Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.
Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
