“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

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.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

I love relaxing with a good book.

As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you’re doing good in my book.

Failure is the first chapter in the book of success. 

Words are power. And a book is full of words. Be careful what power you get from it. But know that you do.

So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.