I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.

Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.

The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.