Ideas are nothing, doing is everything

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one

Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday does not know where it is today.

Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

A land without memories is a people without liberty.

Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

Everybody wants happiness, and nobody wants pain, but you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

The grand instructor, time.

I pray you, magnificent Sir, do not trouble yourself to return to us, but await our coming to you.

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Skills make you rich, not theories.

Live and let live. You snooze, you lose. Make your life a dream and your dreams come to life.

Even in the most horrendous situations there is always something to smile about.