Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

The perils of overwork are slight compared to the dangers of inactivity.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

Everything good is costly and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

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

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.

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.

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.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.

I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take for better, for worse, as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

I did not seek greatness. I only sought to fulfill my duties.

Half-finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

No ascent is too steep for mortals. Heaven itself we seek in our folly.

How much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep, forgetting that the sleeping fox catches no poultry, and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave.