Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.

It takes two years to learn to speak and sixty to learn to keep quiet.

I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.

A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense to everything.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Leaders must understand that some people will inevitably sell out to the evil side. Don't waste your time wondering why; spend your time discovering who.

Man is a universe in little.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owning more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

Networking is more about ‘farming’ than it is about ‘hunting’. It’s about cultivating relationships.

The richest people in the world look for and build networks, everyone else looks for work.

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you do or as fast. There is a time when you didn't know what you know today.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. Men are no superior by reason of the accidents of race and color. The are superior who have the best heart—the best brain.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

We have more machinery of government that is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within solitude of his own heart.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bond together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.

I let Ike run the country and I ran the home.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in the state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.