The quote database

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will.

The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way.

Every struggle is a victory.

Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.

If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep.

Life is a fair field, and the right will prosper if we stand by our guns.

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

There is no short road to the realization of these aspirations.

If citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press

It is a well-established principle of law that every wrong has a remedy.

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

Let all our people, leaving behind them the battlefields of dead issues, move forward and in their strength of liberty and the restored Union win the grander victories of peace.

To be swayed by your fluctuating thoughts and impulses is to be weak and powerless; to rightly control and direct those forces is to be strong and powerful.

Do not then vainly imagine that you can obtain the heavenly possessions without making an effort.

Cease your complaining and fretting; none of these things which you blame are the cause of your poverty; the cause is within yourself, and where the cause is, there is the remedy.

Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.

To be able to do a thing, you must begin to do it, and keep on doing it until the thing is mastered.

Give scrupulous attention to the duty of the present moment.

Idleness and a strong will cannot go together, and procrastination is a total barrier to the acquisition of purposeful action.

Our diplomacy should be direct and frank, neither seeking to obtain more nor accepting less than is our due.