William Rounseville Alger Quotes

God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand.

The best aphorisms are.... portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs.

Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities.

Words of love are works of love.

In the rest of Nirvana all sorrows surcease: Only Buddha can guide to that city of Peace Whose inhabitants have the eternal release.

After every storm the sun will smile; for every problem there is a solution, and the soul's indefeasible duty is to be of good cheer.

The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe.

Polite beggary is too common.

A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

Keep your working power at its maximum.

God's mills grind slow, But they grind woe.

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

Every man is his own greatest dupe.

The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life.

To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it.

The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.

Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.

Courage makes a man more than himself; for he is then himself plus his valor.

How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!

There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty.

The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern.

What is the highest secret to victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny.

In the nine heavens are eight Paradises; Where is the ninth one? In the human breast. Only the blessed dwell in th' Paradises, But blessedness dwells in the human breast.

Public opinion is a second conscience.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

Laws are the silent assessors of God.

He who is master of all opinions can never be the bigot of any.

Beware the deadly fumes of that insane elation Which rises from the cup of mad impiety, And go, get drunk with that divine intoxication Which is more sober far than all sobriety.

Heart's-ease is a flower which blooms from the grave of desire.

Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.

The flower which we do not pluck is the only one which never loses its beauty or its fragrance.

True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.

Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.

A blue eye is a true eye; Mysterious is a dark one, Which flashes like a spark sun! A black eye is the best one.

The most terrible of all things is terror.

A fretful fancy is constantly flinging its possessor into gratuitous tophets.

Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth.

Ah, could the soul, like the body, have a mirror! It has,--a friend.

Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond districts of the mind.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.