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

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

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.

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.