Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. In is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and a manly heart.
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To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
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Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.
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Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
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The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
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The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do.
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Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.
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The holiest of holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart The secret anniversaries of the heart.
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The shades of night were falling fast,As though an Alpine village passedA youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,A banner with the strange device,ExcelsiorHis brow was sad his eye beneath,Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,And like a silver clarion rungThe accents of that unknown tongue,Excelsior
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We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funeral tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.
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A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
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Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
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Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
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Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.
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Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
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A torn jacket is soon mended but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
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Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
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Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
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Age is opportunity no less than youth itself.
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It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
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All the means of action - the shapeless masses - the materials - lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.
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The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
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It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.
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The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
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The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart.
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All things must change to something new, to something strange.
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Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
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Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
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You know I say just what I think, and nothing more and less. I cannot say one thing and mean another.
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