“Self-control is only courage under another form.”

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors’ minds ages ago.

Energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details and caries him onward and upward to every station in life.

The reason why so little is done, is generally because so little is attempted.

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.

Character is itself a fortune.

Persons with comparatively moderate powers will accomplish much, if they apply themselves wholly and indefatigably to one thing at a time.

Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.

The healthy spirit of self-help created among working people would, more than any other measure, serve to raise them as a class; and this, not by pulling down others, but by levelling them up to a higher and still advancing standard of religion, intelligence, and virtue.

Marriage like government is a series of compromises. One must give and take, repair and restrain, endure and be patient.

Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.

Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty.

Experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men; for the nation is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal, improvement.

Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.

Good character is property. It is the noblest of all possessions.

Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.

Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

The angels are as perfect in form as they are in spirit.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of ‘I hate strangers and anything that’s different.’

So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.