The best thing that can happen to the truth is that it be investigated.
The truth, however, is never reached by methods of prejudice or undue
assumption. It is approached by fair and honest habits of thought.
We need but to look at the facts.
One owes it to truth also to know the other side.
One must at least give others credit for having opinions. Listen to all,
and accept only that which seems to bear the test of truth.
Stay with the right, though all the rest of the world disagree with you.
If you find that your position was wrong, forsake it immediately.
Thinking is not always the order of the day, however, when either profit
or appetite is involved.
It is a rather pitiful fact that it became necessary to have laws to do
what the rational conscience had failed to do.
A certain advantage can be taken at a time when everyone is afraid of
being misjudged. Like the undertaker’s bill, such things are often brought
forward at a time when everyone feels that he must swallow the dose and
ask no questions.
A wrong philosophy can lead a nation to its ruin within the space of a few
generations. A worthy one can as promptly and definitely determine a
nation’s progress and happiness.---The thinkers of a nation sow the seeds.
The people sooner or later harvest the fruit.
The lack of idealism is the most expensive thing the people of any city
can have on their hands.---If you want thieves, hoodlums, and
libertines, create a low standard of ideals in the community, and you
will get them.
Only the constructive thinker makes the great general, the great leader,
or the great engineer.
It is the unnecessary that changes bare existence into throbbing and
purposeful life.
We need to remember that it is the will uncompelled that tames the
wilderness, that it is the hand unconstrained that reclaims the desert,
and that it is the kindness born of spontaneous impulse which brings into
life the uplifting and the helpful.
We do not get at the danger of any evil by comparing one evil with
another. The question for a vigorous Nation in a trying time is not as to
what is the harm in a thing but as to what is the good.
A thought or a feeling of aspiration, however great or strong, is not
meant to be an end within itself. It is a means to the end of its actual
realization in action and accomplishment.
No less important than the things which we have been given are the things
from which we have been saved.
Great movements must always be fathered by self-sacrificing spirits before
they are finally taken upon the hearts of the people.
There is only one way to change the past, and that is to change it before
it becomes the past.
Make this day what you desire.... It must dwell in your thoughts forever
as a piercing thorn or a blooming flower. Your hand is on its gate for
the last time.
...we must recognize the common human tendency to glorify the past to the
disadvantage of the present.---One may read something of this sort in the
literature of ancient as well as modern ages. Yet the progress of the
world has gone right on.
...the religious consciousness is best developed in the solitudes.
Any reform is rapid when men once get to thinking. The case is hopeless so
long as apathy and lethargy prevail.
Nothing is to be gained by compromising with the mind of the flesh,
which is death.
Our place as a nation is largely the result of this union of hope and
thing, this combination of dream and realization, this blending of the
ideal and the practical.
Man is he who thinks, and the most successful man is he who thinks most
promptly and accurately.