All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But all play and no work makes him something worse.

Cecil's dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, "The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once."

The Romans rightly employed the same word (virtus) to designate courage, which is, in a physical sense, what the other is in a moral; the highest virtue of all being victory over ourselves.

The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

Character is itself a fortune.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.