The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles... are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.

Be methodical if you would succeed in business, or in anything. Have a work for every moment, and mind the moment's work. Whatever your calling, master all its bearings and details, its principles, instruments and applications. Method is essential if you would get through your work easily and with economy of time.

It is not, of course, the subject that is or isn't dull, but the quality of attention that we do or do not pay to it. Dull subjects are those we have failed.

Talking, is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books.

As frost, raised to its utmost intensity, produces the sensation of fire, so any good quality, overwrought and pushed to excess, turns into its own contrary.

The power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument.

The petty cares, the minute anxieties, the infinite littles which go to make up the sum of human experience, like the invisible granules of powder, give the last and highest polish to a character.