“The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.”

All government is an evil, but, of the two form’s of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.

The greatest geniuses have always attributed everything to God, as if conscious of being possessed of a spark of His divinity.

No man, perhaps, is so wicked as to commit evil for its own sake. Evil is generally committed under the hope of some advantage the pursuit of virtue seldom obtains. Yet the most successful result of the most virtuous heroism is never without its alloy.

We are a compound of both here and hereafter; we shall be made responsible for the actions of both while here. Anything beyond this is beyond our power to prove, and would be of no real value if we could.

Satan is to be punished eternally in the end, but for a while he triumphs.

Nothing is difficult; it is only we who are indolent.

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.

Mistrusts sometimes come over one’s mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?

Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.

Temperance in everything is requisite for happiness.

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.

How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness!

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

Do your duty, and don’t swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.

Some persons are so devotional they have not one bit of true religion in them.

Genius in poverty is never feared, because nature, though liberal in her gifts in one instance, is forgetful in another.

One bright and thankful look at the cross is worth a thousand morbid, self-condemning reflections.

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.

Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.

Treat yourself as your own beloved child.

Each role has its own different challenges.

To be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.