“Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.”

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

A man lives by believing something.

Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don’t happen at all.

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

There are remedies for all things but death.

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.