76
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
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77
I can say with conviction that the struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women.
78
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
79
if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours
80
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
81
There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.
82
Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace.
83
Whether one be fearful or fearless, foolish or wise, troubled or serene, within that soul lies the cause of its own state or states, and never without.
84
As there are silent depths in the ocean which the fiercest storm cannot reach, so there are silent, holy depths in the heart of man which the storms of sin and sorrow can never disturb.
85
Sorrow purifies and deepens the soul, and the extremity of sorrow is the prelude to Truth.
86
Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things which you blame are the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy.
87
The man that stands upon a principle is the same calm, dauntless, self-possessed man under all circumstances.
88
To be swayed by your fluctuating thoughts and impulses is to be weak and powerless; to rightly control and direct those forces is to be strong and powerful.
89
To grow in self-control, in patience, in equanimity, is to grow in strength and power; and you can only thus grow by focusing your consciousness upon a principle.
90
Do not then vainly imagine that you can obtain the heavenly possessions without making an effort.
91
Give scrupulous attention to the duty of the present moment.
92
Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.
93
If he is perplexed, unhappy, restless, or wretched, let him look to himself, for there and nowhere else is the source of all his trouble.
94
To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.
95
Reverie is a loose dreaming into which a man falls; meditation is a strong, purposeful thinking into which a man rises.
96
Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.
97
Idleness and a strong will cannot go together, and procrastination is a total barrier to the acquisition of purposeful action.
98
Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.
99
Do not, I beg you, dread those things which the immortal gods apply to our minds like spurs: misfortune is virtue's opportunity.
100
There are a thousand other instances in which application has conquered all obstacles, and proved that nothing which the mind has set itself to endure is difficult.