“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

Speech is silver, silence is golden.

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

A person with a clear purpose will make progress, even on the roughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress, even on the smoothest road.

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.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.

Don’t be afraid to go to your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency.

There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, “now what?