1
Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.
Abraham Lincolnverified·Address before the Washingtonian Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois·February 22, 1842
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2
Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his own best interests.
Abraham Lincolnverified·Address before the Washingtonian Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois·February 22, 1842
3
Every evening he should examine his heart as to what he has done to see whether he has gained or lost in his spiritual capital.
4
On the other hand, in a State where the citizens are nearly on an equality, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power.
5
Men of the best intentions and soundest views may differ in their construction of some parts of the Constitution, but there are others on which dispassionate reflection can leave no doubt.
6
The case before us illustrates better than most that the judicial power is often difficult in its exercise.
7
More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he achieves the impossible.
8
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.
9
What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together.
10
Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which is the hardest test.
11
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.
12
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.
13
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Wrongly attributed
This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.
14
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget,--but not himself, his own character.
15
No man is so formed that he can be left entirely to himself, to go his own ways; everyone needs to be guided by a preconceived plan, and to follow certain general rules.
16
our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint
17
God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.
Attribution contested
Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.
18
The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not, as we feel in a thousand instances.
19
The men you see spending most of their time looking for higher and more lucrative positions are, nine times out of ten, men who have made worthless failures in other places.
20
Your life will be wasted if you go away from here and have not learned that the greatest lesson of all is the lesson of brotherly love, of usefulness and of charity.
21
You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.
22
Mere intelligence is still not courage, for we often see the cleverest people devoid of resolution.
23
War is the province of uncertainty: three-fourths of those things upon which action in War must be calculated, are hidden more or less in the clouds of great uncertainty.
24
There are persons who possess the keenest perception for the most difficult problems, who are also not fearful of responsibility, and yet in cases of difficulty cannot come to a resolution.
25
Although our intellect always feels itself urged towards clearness and certainty, still our mind often feels itself attracted by uncertainty.