You cannot escape the results of your thoughts. Whatever your present environment may be you will fall remain or rise with your thoughts your vision your ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire as great as your dominant aspiration.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

A weak mind is like a microscope which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.

Where the willingness is great the difficulties cannot be great.

The little may contrast with the great in painting but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast but there are also colors contrary to each other that is which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery above weakness above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

If you cannot do great things do small things in a great way.

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.