The king is the man who can.

What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.

Action

Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Adversity

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

Anger

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Behavior

It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.

Belief

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.

Books and Reading

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Change

The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change.

Cheerfulness

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Commitment

A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.

Critics and Criticism

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Devil

The devil has his elect.

Doubt

The fearful unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Enthusiasm

The condition of the most passionate enthusiast is to be preferred over the individual who, because of the fear of making a mistake, won't in the end affirm or deny anything.

Eyes

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Faith

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Faults

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Goals

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Greatness

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Health

Ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat. Health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy!

History and Historians

The whole past is the procession of the present.

Honesty

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Ideals and Idealism

The actual well seen is ideal.

Impossibility

It is not a lucky word, this name "impossible"; no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouths.

Invention and Inventor

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

Labor

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Leaders and Leadership

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.

Life and Living

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Love

Love is not altogether a delirium, yet it has many points in common therewith.

Money

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world.

Music

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

Opinions

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Perseverance

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacle s, discouragement s, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

Present

We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.

Purpose

The purpose of man is in action not thought.

Reason

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

Responsibility

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

Sentiment

The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.

Silence

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Sincerity

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Soul

The soul gives unity to what it looks at with love.

Spirit and Spirituality

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Thoughts and Thinking

Thought is the parent of the deed.

Understanding

No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.

Universe

I don't pretend to understand the Universe -- it's a great deal bigger than I am.

Victory

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.

Vocation

It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe.

Wonder

Wonder is the basis of worship.

Work

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.