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Life is but a succession of opportunities. They are for good or evil,--as we make them.

Man can develop his self-reliance by seeking constantly to surpass himself.

Self-confidence sees the possibilities of the individual; self-reliance realizes them.

To him, defeat is no more than passing through a tunnel is to a traveller,--he knows he must emerge again into the sunlight.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.

It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own thoughts.

The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle.

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we see only as much as we please of one another's characters afterwards.

The busiest man needs no more hours of rest than the idler.

The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily physiological, phenomena.

the great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy

Surely it is hardly fitting that the ruler should be baser than the ruled.

My life has a limit, but my knowledge is without limit.

The pure men of old slept without dreams, and waked without anxiety.

Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature,--opposition to it in his love of justice.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

The aim of moral discipline is to purify the heart from the rust of passion and resentment, till, like a clear mirror, it reflects the light of God.

The soul should take care of the body, just as a pilgrim on his way to Mecca takes care of his camel.

The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.

It is because it is so much easier to shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your average man can do.

There is no doubt that a blizzard has a bewildering and numbing effect upon the brain of any one exposed to it.

Hence the necessity that he should have been well trained in habits, who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and moral philosophy generally.

The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the will; so that the brain may act according to the precepts which the brain itself gives.