He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
— Walter Scott
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.
It is wonderful what strength of purpose and boldness and energy of will are roused by the assurance that we are doing our duty.
Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.
What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.
Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.
He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.
To all, to each, a fair good-night, and pleasing dreams, and slumbers light.
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!
Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life.
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.
If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.
Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.
What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.
To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.
Success - keeping your mind awake and your desire asleep.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below, and saints above: For love is heaven, and heaven is love.
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.
Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.
Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.
The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-men; and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.
The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.
Look back, and smile on perils past.
Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake.
O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!
For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.
How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.
There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
