“There is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and developed into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature. Life is one prolonged birth.”

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.

No emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form.

Death is the Christian’s vacation morning. School is out. It is time to go home.

It will not do to be saints at meeting and sinners everywhere else.

Education is only like good culture,–it changes the size, but not the sort.

Laws are not masters but servants, and he rules them who obey them.

Faith is spiritualized imagination.

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity.

Do not be afraid of defeat. You are never so near victory as when you are defeated in a good cause.

We never know the love of the parent for the child till we become parents.

Our government is built upon the vote. But votes that are purchasable are quicksands, and a government built on them stands upon corruption and revolution.

Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.

Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else.

Because the only thing that stays with you from the moment you’re born until the moment you die is your breath. All your friends, your family, the country you live in, all of that can change. The one thing that stays with you is your breath.

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.

I am not born to just become an actor.

Nature loves you ten times more than a mother loves her newborn.

Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.

Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one’s own sins.

There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.

I was born into it and there was nothing I could do about it. It was there, like air or food, or any other element. The only question with wealth is what you do with it.