The quote database

All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.

It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues.

Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.

"Inherent differences" between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity.

Human judgment is never unerring, and is rarely regarded as otherwise than wrong by the unsuccessful party in the contest.

Futurity is the proper abode of hope and fear, with all their train and progeny of subordinate apprehensions and desires.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears; and to all these, the consideration of mortality is a certain and adequate remedy.

By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.

Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings, because they are his own.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

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.

To disappoint a friend is unpleasing; and he that forms expectations like yours, must be disappointed.

Work in moderation is healthy, as well as agreeable to the human constitution.

A man must have the courage to be himself, and not the shadow or the echo of another.

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

Energy of temperament, with a moderate degree of wisdom, will carry a man further than any amount of intellect without it.

A man must so train his habits as to rely upon his own powers and depend upon his own courage in moments of emergency.

Self-respect, originating in self-love, instigates the first step of improvement.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles

We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.

Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man.

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character.

almost any man can do a great deal, if he will, by getting the utmost possible service out of the qualities that he actually possesses

I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground.