Great Throughts Treasury

"I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people."

"Defeats are always pitiful. Victories are always last resources."

"The purpose of life is to believe, to hope, and to strive."

"It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves."

"Never forget that when we are silent, we are one. And when we speak, we are two."

"Without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue. You have to have courage – courage of different kinds: first, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up to that – no matter what comes in your way, no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is."

"Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb the air as you go forward you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle."

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

"Opposition comes not only from your enemies but sometimes from your friends, and the latter is much more difficult to face. You have to have physical courage, because very often going along the path of your choice is full of physical handicap hardship."

"The power to question is the basis of all human progress."

"You can't shake hands with a clenched fist."

"A nation's strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others."

"You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose."