Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations or men more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature-not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.