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

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Happy the people whose annals are vacant.

Every noble work is at first impossible.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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

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

Work alone is noble.

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

Be not a slave of words.

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

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

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

No person is important enough to make me angry.

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

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

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

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

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

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

All great peoples are conservative.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

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.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

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

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

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.

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.

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.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

No violent extreme endures.

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

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.

No pressure, no diamonds.

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

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.

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

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

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

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