Books are the best of things, well used; abused, the worst. What is the right use? What is the end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

Colleges… can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Children are all foreigners.

Many times the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Books are the best type of the influence of the past… The theory of books is noble.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.

See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.

The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life”.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness.

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Skill to do comes of doing.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.

So is cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more remains.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.

Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Character is higher than intellect.[…] A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Shallow men believe in luck or circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm.

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without.

I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies.

The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, obey thyself.

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your’re the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.