Quotes

Forever is composed of nows.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.