You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are
It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.
Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision,to the releasing of a trigger.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
A friend to all is a friend to none
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.
Do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in few!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today.
Work is the price which is paid for reputation.
There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
The experience gathered from books, though often valuable,is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom.
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.