There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give a stranger a meal,….

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he st….

The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do..

Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man..

Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves….

Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up….

A great man is always willing to be little..

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate;….

The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These ….

God will not make himself manifest to cowards.

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue..

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames..

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we callFate..

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to t….

The first lesson of history is that evil is good..

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified..

Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimneyside of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front..

Men are what their mothers made them..

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health..

By virtue of the Deity thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject ….

The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twe….