Top 41 Quotes & Sayings by William Rounseville Alger

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.

A blue eye is a true eye; Mysterious is a dark one, Which flashes like a spark sun! A black eye is the best one.

Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.

Words of love are works of love.

God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.

Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth.

Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

Courage makes a man more than himself; for he is then himself plus his valor.

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

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

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

Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature.

The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.

There is one thing diviner than duty, namely, the bond of obligation transmuted into liberty.

The flower which we do not pluck is the only one which never loses its beauty or its fragrance.

I would give more for the private esteem and love of one than for the public praise of ten thousand.

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

Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.

Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.

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.

Fate is the friend of the good, the guide of the wise, the tyrant of the foolish, the enemy of the bad.

Keep your working power at its maximum.

A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.

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.

Polite beggary is too common.

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

God's mills grind slow, But they grind woe.

Ah, could the soul, like the body, have a mirror! It has,--a friend.

The most terrible of all things is terror.

The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

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

How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!

Beware the deadly fumes of that insane elation Which rises from the cup of mad impiety, And go, get drunk with that divine intoxication Which is more sober far than all sobriety.

Common sense is the average sensibility and intelligence of men undisturbed by individual peculiarities.

The best aphorisms are.... portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs.

Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

The lower a man descends in his love, the higher he lifts his life.

Every man is his own greatest dupe.

Laws are the silent assessors of God.