Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Who can guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?
First and foremost, it’s going to be treat others with respect. Be polite: Manners go a long way. Try to come from a good place. And aside from that, stay focused and do the right thing.
He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?
Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.
Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.
At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.
Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.
