W. R. 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.

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard.

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.

Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

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

The candidate was required to prepare himself by confession, fasting, and passing the night in prayer.

No period of my life has been one of such unmixed happiness as the four years which have been spent within college walls.

I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.

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.

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

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.

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

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.

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

The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

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

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.

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

Laws are the silent assessors of God.

Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.

The most terrible of all things is terror.

Words of love are works of love.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

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

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.

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.