All quotes

If errors have been committed they ought to be corrected; if the policy is sound it ought to be supported.

If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Spend, then, the fleeting remnant of your time in a spirit that accords with Nature, and depart contentedly.

He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception.

I have never had any trouble turning the page in the book of my life.

You are going to make mistakes — own them, make amends, and move on. Guilt and regret kills many a man before their time. Turn the page, get off the ride.

The ultimate effect of parasitism is always a paralysis of the will and an inability to compel oneself into any course of action for the moment unpleasurable and exhaustive.

All our egoistic impulses, our selfish desires, obscure our true vision of the soul.

He who is wise tries to harmonise the wishes that seek for self-gratification with the wish for the social good, and only thus can he realise his higher self.

It is the function of religion not to destroy our nature but to fulfil it.

We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

"Inherent differences" between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man.

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character.

I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects of advancement.

Extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes.

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.

When this corrupting passion once takes possession of the human mind, like the love of gold it becomes insatiable.

One's beliefs have long been thought to be sanctuaries which government could not invade.

It doesn't matter to me any longer how long I live, what matters to me most is how I live.