What lasting progress was ever made in social reformation, except when every step was insured by appeals to the understanding and the will?

The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles... are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.

The same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man's spirit, embitter another's.

Be methodical if you would succeed in business, or in anything. Have a work for every moment, and mind the moment's work.

The smallest thing, well done, becomes artistic.

One well-cultivated talent, deepened and enlarged, is worth one hundred shallow faculties.

Unless a man has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous.

As frost, raised to its utmost intensity, produces the sensation of fire, so any good quality, overwrought and pushed to excess, turns into its own contrary.

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.

Criminals are opportunists. If you've got a booming market, they're going to get away with more fraud.

The power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument.

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

You can only appreciate being up when you know what it's like to have been down.

A house can be replaced but never a lost life.

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people.

Those who would judge us merely by the heights we have achieved would do well to remember the depths from which we started.

There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer.

Thought makes everything fit for use.

The earmark favor factory needs to be boarded up and demolished, not turned over to new management that may or may not have a better eye for earmarks with 'merit.'

When you give a man a dole you deny him his dignity, and when you deny him his dignity you rob him his destiny.