“The wealth that cannot be administered is a burden.”

“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”

“All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.”

“It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.”

“As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.”

“This act is an ancient tale new told;And, in the last repeating, troublesome,Being urged at a time unseasonable.”

“The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart.”

“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”

“Happy, vibrant, successful people think and behave in certain ways. So do miserable and unfulfilled people. In other words, there are patterns of success and patterns of failure. The good news is, success leaves clues.”

“If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.”

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”

“Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.”

“We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.”

“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.”