Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.

• reading
• thought

The great secret of success in life is for a man to be ready when his opportunity comes.

• opportunity

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

• patience
• genius

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

• education
• knowledge

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

• encouragement

Action may not always be happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

• actions
• happiness

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.

• emotion

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

• government
• democracy

I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will that will state even existence for its fulfillment.

• purpose
• goals
• determination