I don't like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

Man is, properly speaking, based upon hope, he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.

All men, if they work not as in the great taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, and work unhappily for themselves and for you.

The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature be these what they may.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.