All quotes

If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.

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

Every corps is a chain of despots, who, submitting and tyrannizing without exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community.

This habit of putting off until tomorrow that which you should have done last week or last year or a score of years ago is gnawing at the very vitals of your being, and you can accomplish nothing until you throw it off.

Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

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.

Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour.

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

nature makes us free and unrestrained, but we bind and confine immure and force ourselves into small and scanty space

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

It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances.

In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.

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?

In judging others a man laboureth in vain; he often erreth, and easily falleth into sin; but in judging and examining himself he always laboureth to good purpose.

Never had I felt confinement less—I who feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly alive!

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface.

We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don't come to our own. It is there, but we don't get at it. The threshold must be made to shift.