The quote database

Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.

This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.

When this corrupting passion once takes possession of the human mind, like the love of gold it becomes insatiable.

the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy

The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.

The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

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

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.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

One's beliefs have long been thought to be sanctuaries which government could not invade.

Surely it is hardly fitting that the ruler should be baser than the ruled.

The pure men of old slept without dreams, and waked without anxiety.

My life has a limit, but my knowledge is without limit.

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.