The quote database

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

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

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.

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

An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness.

Nothing can be more certain than that the character can only be sustained and strengthened by its own energetic action.

In judging others a man laboureth in vain; he often erreth, and easily falleth into sin; but in judging and examining himself he always laboureth to good purpose.

Now dost thou resolve to avoid a fault, and within an hour thou behavest thyself as if thou hadst never resolved at all.

One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings

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!

There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge, strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.