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There are a thousand other instances in which application has conquered all obstacles, and proved that nothing which the mind has set itself to endure is difficult.

Great men, I say, often rejoice at crosses of fortune just as brave soldiers do at wars.

Fortune lashes and mangles us: well, let us endure it: it is not cruelty, it is a struggle, in which the oftener we engage the braver we shall become.

Am I equipped for nothing but to lie among the bed-clothes and keep warm?

If you are beaten off, return again to the effort, and content yourself that your conduct is generally such as becomes a man.

Make trial how the life of a good man succeeds with you, the life of one who is content with the lot appointed him by Providence

the mind can convert and change everything that impedes its activity into matter for its action; hindrance in its work becomes its real help, and every obstruction makes for its progress

Others, who love the art that they have made their own, exhaust themselves with labouring at it unwashed and unfed.

In rest you go beyond these limits, and beyond what is enough; but in action you do not fill the measure, and remain well within your powers.

So few of us can understand what it takes to make a man—the man who will never say die; the man who will never give up

If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started.

To me, a man has no master but God. Man in his authority is a sovereign lord.

My dear Laelius and Scipio, we must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains.

he kept his mind at full stretch like a bow, and never gave in to old age by growing slack

The fact is that old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one.

Surely the United States Senate is big enough to take self-criticism and self-appraisal.

As members of the minority party, we do not have the primary authority to formulate the policy of our government. But we do have the responsibility of rendering constructive criticism, of clarifying issues, of allaying fears by acting as responsible citizens.

You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work. You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly.

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.

Shirking responsibility has never been a fault with which colored women might be truthfully charged.

With tireless energy and eager zeal, colored women have, since their emancipation, been continuously prosecuting the work of educating and elevating their race, as though upon themselves alone devolved the accomplishment of this great task.

And yet, in spite of the opposition encountered, and the obstacles opposed to their acquisition of knowledge and their accumulation of property, the progress made by colored women along these lines has never been surpassed by that of any people in the history of the world.

And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.

Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?