Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Will and intellect are one and the same thing.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.
Rich men's houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.
An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.
The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Learn to give, whether you have plenty or little, whether you are happy or in pain.
A lie never lives to be old.
Memory... is an internal rumour.
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others
When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
If information and knowledge are central to democracy, they are the conditions for development.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
We need to keep hope alive and strive to do better.
