William Ewart Gladstone

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Failure is success if we learn from it.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

Stupidity is something you can only partly save people from.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

Hasty resolutions are of the nature of vows, and to be equally avoided

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.