The quote database

It is the function of religion not to destroy our nature but to fulfil it.

All our egoistic impulses, our selfish desires, obscure our true vision of the soul.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

It doesn't matter to me any longer how long I live, what matters to me most is how I live.

"Inherent differences" between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

A man must have the courage to be himself, and not the shadow or the echo of another.

Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man.

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character.

I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

Rather be an hour early than a minute late.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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.

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

Look before you leap.

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

I looked in your cup to see if you had enough. You looked in mine to check if I had more than you. That difference says everything. We are not the same.

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.

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

One's beliefs have long been thought to be sanctuaries which government could not invade.