The quote database

My sensations as we approached what I supposed might be 'a field of battle' were anything but agreeable.

One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings

Never had I felt confinement less—I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!

Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.

Extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes.

The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.

Desire is a manifestation of power.

Do all that you can do in a perfect manner every day, but do it without haste, worry, or fear. Go as fast as you can, but never hurry.

Every thought we think makes it necessary for us to think another thought; consciousness is continually expanding.

Rest and recreation are also necessary to his physical life.

Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance.

Success in life is becoming what you want to be.

Every person naturally wants to become all that he is capable of becoming; this desire to realize innate possibilities is inherent in human nature; we cannot help wanting to be all that we can be.

If I felt that there is to be sole responsibility in the Executive for the America of tomorrow I should shrink from the burden.

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle.

It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own thoughts.

Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we see only as much as we please of one another's characters afterwards.

There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge, strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it.

Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.

When this corrupting passion once takes possession of the human mind, like the love of gold it becomes insatiable.

This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.