Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

If we all can persevere, if we can in every land and office look beyond our own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

It is stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts prosecution.

It is very important to know who you are. To make decisions. To show who you are.

It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

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.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.

How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.

Keep your mind off the things you don’t want by keeping it on the things you do want.

By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

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.

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.