If you believe in fate, believe in it, at least, for your good.
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
To fill the hour – that is happiness.
A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.
A great man is always willing to be little.
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
The city is recruited from the country.
Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.
Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.
Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well — he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.
The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
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