The quote database

If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep.

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

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.

Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.

If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.

Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help and self-government there is a natural incompatibility.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Pride in one's work is aroused as soon as work is functionalized. The moment a man has something to do that he likes to do, and can do well, he takes pride in it.

In rest you go beyond these limits, and beyond what is enough; but in action you do not fill the measure, and remain well within your powers.

Am I equipped for nothing but to lie among the bed-clothes and keep warm?

Make trial how the life of a good man succeeds with you, the life of one who is content with the lot appointed him by Providence

The fact is that old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one.

Surely the United States Senate is big enough to take self-criticism and self-appraisal.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves

Give others and yourself more credit. It just happened, you witnessed it, you just did it, believe it.

We have created a fictitious ceiling, a roof, to our expectations of ourselves, a limit — where we think it’s all too good to be true.

Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels.

The athlete trains for his race; and the mind must be put into training if one will win life's race.

I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them

It is for our self to know that it must be born anew every moment of its life.

He who is wise tries to harmonise the wishes that seek for self-gratification with the wish for the social good, and only thus can he realise his higher self.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide

Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know--had always an inclination to be idle.

Nothing can be more certain than that the character can only be sustained and strengthened by its own energetic action.