12 quotes
Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced" in order to be known.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the state, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
Nothing lives in literature but that which has the vitality of creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
Grit is in the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,—spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
A large proportion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
Seneca, with two millions out at usury, can afford to chant the praises of poverty; but for our part, we prefer the fine extravagance of that philosopher, who declared "that no man was as rich as all men ought to be."
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
In the strife of parties and principles, backbone without brains will carry it against brains without backbone. A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
We all originally came from the woods; it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment money gets into our pockets, it somehow or other breaks out in ornaments on our persons, without always giving refinement to our manners.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)
Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.
Success and Its Conditions (1871)