The quote database

We classify too much and enjoy too little.

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world

There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet every body fools us out of it that has a mind to it.

Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point-blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining

In that category before anything else comes old age, to which all wish to attain, and at which all grumble when attained.

The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.

Happiness demands a certain outcome, it is result reliant.

If happiness is what you’re after, then you are going to be let down frequently and be unhappy much of your time.

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

The athlete trains for his race; and the mind must be put into training if one will win life's race.

Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself

As therefore the shoe is shaped by the foot, and not the foot by the shoe, so does the disposition make the life similar to itself.

In the next place, it is false that those that have little to do are easy in mind.

Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances.

Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know--had always an inclination to be idle.

In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality

Never had I felt confinement less—I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.