Updated: 03/08/2010

1. The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.

2. Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly beggar.

3. The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

4. "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."

5. People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

6. Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

7. We are always getting ready to live but never living.

8. Blame is safer than praise.

9. Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

10. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

11. Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

12. A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

13. I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

14. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

15. There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement.

16. You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

17. What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

18. Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

19. Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it.

20. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing

21. The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

22. Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

23. Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

24. Concentration is the secret of strength.

25. We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

26. People only see what they are prepared to see.

27. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.

28. Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

29. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

30. The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

31. When it's dark enough men see stars.

32. As soon as there is life there is danger.

33. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

34. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do."

35. Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

36. The only way to have a friend is to be one.

37. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

38. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

39. Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

40. The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

41. We gain the strength of the temptations we resist.

42. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

43. Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.

44. Every wall is a door.

45. What you are comes to you

46. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

47. It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

48. To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

49. For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

50. Nothing external to you has any power over you.

51. We must be our own before we can be another's.

1. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

2. It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The questions is: what are we busy about?

3. If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

4. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

5. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

6. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

7. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

8. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

9. I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

10. It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

11. In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

12. Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

13. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

14. However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

15. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

16. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be on a crowded velvet cushion.

17. Men have become tools of their tools.

18. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

19. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

20. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity!

21. Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

22. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

23. I never found a companion so companionable as solitude.

24. If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

25. Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

26. The man who goes out alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready.

27. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

28. It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

29. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

30. We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

31. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

32. Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

33. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.

34. Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one.

35. If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

36. The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

37. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not dispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

38. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

39. All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

40. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.