William Rounseville Alger Quotes

The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

A blue eye is a true eye; Mysterious is a dark one, Which flashes like a spark sun! A black eye is the best one.

After every storm the sun will smile; for every problem there is a solution, and the soul's indefeasible duty is to be of good cheer.

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.

A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

Public opinion is a second conscience.

Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth.

To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it.

What is the highest secret to victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny.

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.

Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.

Words of love are works of love.

The most terrible of all things is terror.

Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.

The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

Laws are the silent assessors of God.

God's mills grind slow, But they grind woe.

Beware the deadly fumes of that insane elation Which rises from the cup of mad impiety, And go, get drunk with that divine intoxication Which is more sober far than all sobriety.

The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life.

True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.

A fretful fancy is constantly flinging its possessor into gratuitous tophets.

There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Polite beggary is too common.

The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe.

Courage makes a man more than himself; for he is then himself plus his valor.

I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand.

The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

Keep your working power at its maximum.

In the rest of Nirvana all sorrows surcease: Only Buddha can guide to that city of Peace Whose inhabitants have the eternal release.

Every man is his own greatest dupe.

Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities.

God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern.

How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!

He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

Heart's-ease is a flower which blooms from the grave of desire.

The flower which we do not pluck is the only one which never loses its beauty or its fragrance.

Ah, could the soul, like the body, have a mirror! It has,--a friend.

Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.