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

One might almost fear,” writes a thoughtful woman, “seeing how the women of to-day are lightly stirred up to run after some new fashion or faith, that heaven is not so near to them as it was to their mothers and grandmothers.

Self-control is only courage under another form.

Riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action; and in many cases they are quite as much a misfortune as a blessing.

The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.

A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful,” says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example.

The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.

Hope… is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.

Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse–either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.

Those who aren’t making mistakes probably aren’t making anything.

Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.

The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.

Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.

The great high-road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast, well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the most successful; success treads on the heels of every right effort.

Self-control is only courage under another form. It may also be regarded as the primary essence of character.

For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.

Work is one of the best educators of practical character.

The bottom line for Republicans is this: The United States can have an open door without having open borders, but we cannot preserve the country we love by slamming that door in the faces of those who most aspire to join our nation.

Your desire for involvement with the world of means when Allah has withdrawn you from it is a fall from high aspiration.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

I think it’s important that we remind everybody that America was never great in itself. It’s been great in its aspirations.

I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief.

To be in the association of those aspiring to love God is the ultimate gift of God.

In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.