WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

Public opinion is a second conscience.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

Words of love, are works of love.

He who has no wish to be happier is the happiest of men.

The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little.

Every man is his own greatest dupe.

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

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

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.

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

When man seized the loadstone of science, the loadstar of superstition vanished in the clouds.

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.

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

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

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

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

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