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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.

A false and a childish sorrow is appeased with as false and as childish a revenge.

A wise man gives way to tears in some cases, and cannot avoid them in others.

There is nothing that we can properly call our own but our time, and yet every body fools us out of it that has a mind to it.

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

We are responsible for what we are; and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves.

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

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

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.

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

Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.

Desire is a manifestation of power.

Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance.

Every person naturally wants to become all that he is capable of becoming; this desire to realize innate possibilities is inherent in human nature; we cannot help wanting to be all that we can be.

Every thought we think makes it necessary for us to think another thought; consciousness is continually expanding.

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

Success in life is becoming what you want to be.

The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.

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.

If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.

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

This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.

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