Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
We change, whether we like it or not.
Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires ... courage.
Whatever you do, you need courage. ... To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.
Do not be too timid and squeamish. ... All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.
Courage consists of the power of self-recovery.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.
As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both.
I pay the School Master, but 'tis the school boys that educate my son.
The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.
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 himself for better, for worse as his portion.
The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly adds to our power and enlarges our field of action.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experience.