All quotes

To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation

A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.

In rest you go beyond these limits, and beyond what is enough; but in action you do not fill the measure, and remain well within your powers.

Make trial how the life of a good man succeeds with you, the life of one who is content with the lot appointed him by Providence

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.

In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves.

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.

A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk.

An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness.

Nothing can be more certain than that the character can only be sustained and strengthened by its own energetic action.

Now dost thou resolve to avoid a fault, and within an hour thou behavest thyself as if thou hadst never resolved at all.

One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings

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

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.

A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.

Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.

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?

Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.

Many of us imprison ourselves in the narrow limited poverty thought, and then, like caged eagles trying in vain to get free, we beat out our wings against the bars we have ourselves put up.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines