You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.

A fair character is a fair fortune.

The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristics in men.

Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against our faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by tellings against ourselves.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

I have to face life with a newly found passion. I must rediscover the irresistible will to learn, to live and to love.

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

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

If you want a new idea, read an old book.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

I had long since taught myself to follow the inner voice. I delighted in submitting to it. To act against it would be difficult and painful to me.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature; it is our future that lays down the law of our today.

Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives, forgetting loses the lesson.

These are the arks, the trophies, I erect, That fortify thy name against old age.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others, than you can by what others say about him!

The first method of estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.