Biography
"Success soon palls. The joyous time is when the breeze first strikes your sails, and the waters rustle under your bows."
"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal."
"Concentration alone conquers."
"Silence is the severest criticism."
"How strangely easy difficult things are!"
"Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn."
"All movement, of every creature, comes from the desire after something better."
"One of the finest sayings in the language is John Foster's "Live mightily.""
"Mr. Charles Buxton, M.P., in his pamphlet, "How to Stop Drunkenness," says: "It would not be too much to say that if all drinking of fermented liquors could be done away, crime of every kind would fall to a fourth of its present amount, and the whole tone of moral feeling in the lower order might be indefinitely raised. Not only does this vice produce all kinds of wanton mischief, but it has also a negative effect of great importance. It is the mightiest of all the forces that clog the progress of good. * * * The struggle of the school, the library and the church, all united against the beer-shop and the gin-palace, is but one development of the war between Heaven and hell. It is, in short, intoxication that fills our jails; it is intoxication that fills our lunatic asylums; it is intoxication that fills our work-houses with poor. Were it not for this one cause, pauperism would be nearly extinguished in England.""
"A lovely girl is above all rank."
"A man or a woman may be highly irritable, and yet be sweet, tender, gentle, loving, sociable, kind, charitable, thoughtful for others, unselfish, generous."
"A nation does wisely, if not well, in starving her men of genius. Fatten them, and they are done for."
"A pretty, silly, self-conceited woman will very often be far more courted, and seemingly far more liked and admired, than a woman of infinitely higher charms. All the while the men do not like her a tenth part as well."
"A successful career has been full of blunders."
"All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them."
"Bad temper is its own scourge. Few things are bitterer than to feel bitter. A man’s venom poisons himself more than his victim."
"Cervantes speaks of potted wisdom of "short sentences drawn long experience.""
"Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense."
"Emulation and imitation are of twin birth."
"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul."
"Heavy sorrow is silent, and the deepest mourning is the most solitary."
"I once met a man who had forgiven an injury. I hope some day to meet the man who has forgiven an insult."
"If fortune has fairly sat on a man, he takes it for granted that life consists in being sat upon; but to be coddled on Fortune’s knee, and then have his ears boxed,—that is aggravating."
"In extent sorrow is boundless,—it pours from ten million sources, and floods the world; but its depth is small,—it drowns few."
"In life, as in chess, one’s own pawns block one’s way. A man’s very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him."