The quote database

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

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

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

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

A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day.

If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier.

If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.

We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place.

A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,--each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association.

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.

To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.

Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

It doesn't matter to me any longer how long I live, what matters to me most is how I live.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

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

Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.