“But the school in which good training is most practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars.”

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.

A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.

A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can’t show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.

The best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what do you want, then ask ‘what is true’ – and then ask yourself ‘what should be done about it.’ I believe that if you do this you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don’t!

You have the exact qualities God knew your kids would need in a mother. Each day, hold up your willingness and ask God to make you the best version of you that you can possibly be.

To be successful, we need everyone to think independently and work through disagreement to decide what’s best.

Any year that you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don’t win, at least you can be satisfied that you’ve tried. If you don’t accept failure as a possibility, you don’t set high goals, you don’t branch out, you don’t try – you don’t take the risk.

In my experience the best way to beat depression is to get involved in something inspiring.

I accept my body. I accept how I am and make the best of what I am given. Children orientate towards examples. That’s why I talk solely positive about my body in front of my daughter.