“It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.”

A man lives by believing something.

Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don’t happen at all.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

There are remedies for all things but death.

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.

Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone.

I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.

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.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

I simply seem to drift. But I sort of allow the drift, because it has a kind of check – it forces me to work harder at what I’m interested in.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

Everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

Nature’s law, That man was made to mourn. Man’s inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn! O Death, the poor man’s dearest friend, The kindest and the best!

For I hope my Friends will pardon me, when I declare, I know none of them without a Fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine, I had any Friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness, of this Kind, we give and demand in Turn.

I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.