Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and teachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

A fair character is a fair fortune.

America’s abundance was not created by public sacrifices to the “common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes.

Master of human destinies am I! Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait.

The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.

Those disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory, sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and they will come forth later in uglier ways.

The heights by great men reached and kept Where not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature; these are the spur and reins whereby al mankind are set on work, and guided.