William Rounseville Alger Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.

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

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

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

Public opinion is a second conscience.

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.

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

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

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

Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.

The most terrible of all things is terror.

Words of love are works of love.

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

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

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.

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

Laws are the silent assessors of God.

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.

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

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.

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

The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

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

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

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

Polite beggary is too common.

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

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

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.

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

The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

Keep your working power at its maximum.

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

Every man is his own greatest dupe.

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

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

God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.