“A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.”

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.

We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.

A man who cannot get angry is like a stream that cannot overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes indignation is as good as a thunderstorm in summer, clearing and cooling the air.

Downright admonition, as a rule, is too blunt for the recipient.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.

A man’s character is the reality of himself; his reputation, the opinion others have formed about him; character resides in him, reputation in other people; that is the substance, this is the shadow.

Some people are proud of their humility.

If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.

Christianity is simply the ideal form of manhood represented to us by Jesus Christ.

The beginning is the promise of the end.

The things that hurt us teach us.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

The unthankful heart discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls

One should play and sweat. Life shouldn’t be bogged down by books.

There’s so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.

My definition of secularism is very clear. The sole religion of the Government is Nation First, the holy book is the Constitution.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.