Courage is exhilarating.
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
All of life is a constant education.
People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.
To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.
To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.
Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.
Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.
We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?
We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.
All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.
I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
