15 quotes
No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man, between interest and interest.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
In private life there are few beings more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
A revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual the country in which they take place is going down-hill.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1910)
We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
Throughout our history the success of the homemaker has been but another name for the up-building of the nation.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They sought for true success, and therefore they did not seek ease. They knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
Of course we must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the causes of disaster.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
We cannot possibly do our best work as a nation unless all of us know how to act in combination as well as how to act each individually for himself.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the state and the nation toward property.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
We have a given problem to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)
Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.
The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)