All quotes

Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little.

There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge, strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it.

If we would promise we must put ourselves in a position to perform our promise.

Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.

Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will.

There are some national questions in the solution of which patriotism should exclude partisanship.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree.

Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill.

By holding the representative responsible only to the people, and exempting him from all other influences, we elevate the character of the constituent and quicken his sense of responsibility to his country.

My aim is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as distinguished from the preliminaries to living.

Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he seeks it with disquiet, that he cannot regain it?

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction.

I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.

Life must needs be disgusting alike to the idle rich man as to the idle poor man, who has no work to do, or, having work, will not do it.

If to-day thou art not ready, how shalt thou be ready to-morrow?