If I had the opportunity to say a fine word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don’t think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Youth
No race has ever surpassed the Jewish descriptions of either the beauties or the terrors of the nature which environs man.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Jews
Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarding who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Boredom
The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence
The fear of losing one’s job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Teaching
You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Work
Let us remember that the times which future generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but those of adversity bravely borne.
—Charles William Eliot
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Friendship, Book, Books
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Business, Uncertainty, Doubt, Beliefs
Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Education
Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Kindness, Usefullness, Service, Giving, Selfishness
In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Facts
When blocked or defeated in an enterprise I had much at heart, I always turned immediately to another field of work where progress looked possible, biding my time for a chance to resume the obstructed road.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Opportunities
The best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible today.
—Charles William Eliot
Topics: Value of Time, Time Management
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- James Bryant Conant American Chemist
- Horace Mann American Educator
- Booker T. Washington African-American Educationist
- Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney American Educator
- Frank Moore Colby American Writer, Editor
- Anne Sullivan Macy American Educator
- Arthur Sherburne Hardy American Engineer
- Robert H. Shaffer American Educator
- Laurence J. Peter Canadian-born American Educator
- E. Merrill Root American Educator
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