“There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.”

We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

The trees reflected in the river – they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.

The activity you’re most avoiding contains your biggest opportunity.

This drink has a magical power. It strengthens the weak, and revives those who have fainted. Those tired after work and physical activity can return their life forces by this drink much sooner than by nourishment. It works as a diuretic, an appetizer, an antitoxin.

Few are more unhappy than those who have great ambition, but little energy to urge it into activity.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Let not a single day pass without your learning a verse, half a verse, or a fourth of it, or even one letter of it; nor without attending to charity, study and other pious activity.

What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.

War is the supreme test of man in which he rises to heights never approached in any other activity.