To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
--_Shakespeare._
Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
--_Lowell._
What must of necessity be done, you can always find out how to do.
--_Ruskin._
He fails not who makes truth his cause,
Nor bends to win the crowd's applause,
He fails not--he who stakes his all
Upon the right and dares to fall.
--_Richard Watson Gilder._
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
Heart within and God o'erhead!
--_Longfellow._
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
--_Longfellow._
Be just and fear not; let all the ends thou aimest at, be thy
country's, thy God's, and truth's.
--_Shakespeare._
For of all sad words of tongue or pen--
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
--_Whittier._
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers;
But error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshippers.
--_Bryant._
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;--
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower,--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all--and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
--_Tennyson._
Life is the beat possible thing we can make of it.
--_Curtis._
Without a sign his sword the brave man draws,
And asks no omen but his country's cause.
--_Pope._
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
--_Shakespeare._
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them?
--_Shakespeare._
Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
--_Webster._
Our grand business is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but
to do what lies clearly at hand.
--_Thomas Carlyle._
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right.
--_Lincoln._
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
--_Gray._