Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into
action is the most difficult thing in the world.


The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from
envy to hate.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent
where there is the lowest degree of culture.

The ideal of beauty is simplicity and tranquility

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have
been hidden from us forever.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every
day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of
the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

What I possess I would gladly retain. Change amuses the mind, yet scarcely
profits.

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able
to do.

Talent is nurtured in solitude; character is formed in the stormy billows of the
world.

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind
that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common,
that they are expressed by the same color.

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and
sublime, leave behind to conquer time.


The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher
reality.

Nature goes on her way, and all that to us seems an exception is really
according to order.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is
seen looking through time.


Age makes us not childish, as some say; it finds us still true children.

No skill or art is needed to grow old; the trick is to endure it.

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt
increases.

Ambition and love are the wings to great deeds.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous
because he has the proper stuff in him.

In the family where the father rules secure, there dwells the peace which thou wilt
in vain seek for elsewhere in the wide world outside

Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his existence
is irretrievably under the control of destiny.

The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and
makes up for his failings.

Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last
day.


There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to
rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

The follies of the wise man are known to himself, but hidden from the
world.

There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they
consider ridiculous...Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the
half foolsand the half wise that the great danger lies

Of all thieves fools are the worst; they rob you of time and temper.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe
they are free.

Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom
stamps it true; He only earns his freedom and existence
Who daily conquers them anew

It is the great triumph of genius to make the common appear novel.

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.


Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius
thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but it is sure to repent every ill-judged
outlay.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as
greater than he is.

Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of
progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.


Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all
merely exists for his sake.

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and
beginning of his life.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our
feet when it stops

True happiness springs from moderation.

The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of
unbelief, however glittering, is empty.


In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better
that book or orator.

He who does not think too much of himself is much more esteemed than
he imagines.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse
to all inaction.

One man's word is no man's word; we should quietly hear both
sides.

Life teaches us to be less severe with ourselves and others.

Life is the childhood of our immortality

All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness,
and opacity.


All that is done in life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality,
transfiguration, and transparency

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.


A useless life is an early death.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life! Each lives it, not to many is it known; and
seize it where you will, it is interesting.

Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.

Love has power to give in a moment what toil can scarcely reach in an age.

He who cannot love must learn to flatter.

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think
laughable.
The trouble is small, the fun is great

The greatest difficulties lie where we are not looking for them.

Difficulties increase the nearer we approach our goal.

Only the heart without a stain knows perfect ease.


What government is the best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and
his powers!
It is equally a mistake to hold one's self too high, or to rate one's self too cheap.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing, and what is not knowable.

I have learned much from disease which life could have never taught me anywhere else.

On every mountain height Is rest.

Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.

The soul is indestructible and its activity will continue through eternity. It is like
the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set at night; but it has in reality only gone to
diffuse its light elsewhere.

I pity men who occupy themselves exclusively with the transitory in things and
lose themselves in the study of what is perishable, since we are here for this very
end- that we may make the perishable imperishable, which we can


It matters little whether a man be mathematically, or philologically, or
artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Existence is God!

Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make
them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our
personal experience.
One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find
something done.

Since time is not a person we can overtake when he is past, let us honor him with
mirth and cheerfulness of heart while he is passing.

It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the
surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where
few are willing to search for it.

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to
do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.


What we do not understand we do not possess.

Our virtues and vices spring from one root.

The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.

The future hides in it gladness and sorrow.

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

The mortal race is far too weak not to grow dizzy on unwonted heights.

Riches amassed in haste will diminish, but those collected by little and
little will multiply.


Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the
end of it. Others do just the same with their time.


He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.

Wisdom is only found in truth

Literature is a fragment of a fragment; of all that ever happened, or has
been said, but a fraction has been written, and of this but little is extant.

All work of man is as the swimmer's. A vast ocean threatensto devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him himself; that is to say, the full and entire conquest which he effects of his faculties and his future.

As beauteous is the world, and many a joy Floats through its wide dominion. But, alas, When we would seize the winged good, it flies,

And step by step, along the path of life, There's nothing true but Heaven.

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