“Who is it that loves me and will love me forever with an affection which no chance, no misery, no crime of mine can do away? It is you, my mother.”

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he believes, he believes it for himself, not for another.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

He who has no vision of eternity has no hold on time.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

Endurance is patience concentrated.

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.

See deep enough, and you see musically.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular, what normal woman wants affection?

We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.

He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist.

Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price.