Russell H. Conwell quotes

Thoroughness is the master-passion in reading, as in every other undertaking. Those who have accumulated wisdom, culture, power, riches, are always prominent for their indefatigable, painstaking thoroughness; nothing to them is a trifle, for "trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." Those who have thought most and felt most and done most from their reading have brought this master passion to it.

… life of simplicity and individuality which was suggested to them by a drop of water and a humming-bird. The smallest things are the largest in importance, if they bring into our lives the largest thoughts and feelings and an incentive to largest actions for self and humanity. Why are we forever looking upon the horizon for what upon closer view lies at our feet? These little beauties of the field rebuke the wanderer and the eminent man when it says to all the world, with a sweet smile and a dainty pout, "You could have found more in my life than has ever been learned from the sages."

… makes it and us an influence for good to our fellows. A man who has read ten pages with real accuracy, says John Ruskin, is forevermore in some measure an educated person. You might read all the books in the British Museum, yet be an utterly illiterate and uneducated person. Our reading without digestion and assimilation is as useless as our food without them. Bacon says that reading makes a full man; but fullness without digestion is dyspepsia. The books whose reading impels us to live nobly and do noble service for others, are the books, and it is a wicked waste of time to read what is a negative quantity. Whoever masters one …

… of men with none of the advantages of the so-called higher education, of which we hear so much to-day, we are forced to agree with Sir Walter Scott that the best part of every man's education is that which he gives himself independent of text-books other than the Book of Life. Every real man and woman attends a school or college, not to learn, but to learn how to learn. This is the best work that schools of any description can do. It lays a firm foundation upon which the man who has learned how to learn can build his own superstructure. The men who have achieved success in the march of the ages are those who have been the architects of their …

… he must live, if he will live effectually; we must first of all be ourselves, must see to it that whatever else is neglected the plants God has put into the individual shall be cultivated—the crop may not be large, but we are accountable for the cultivation, not for the crop. We must be ourselves, and do our own work.

The value of any study depends entirely upon what it has done for us and what we are doing with it. Lowell says that mere learning is as insignificant as the collection of old postage-stamps. Professor Virchow was obliged to try various foods in his experiments with his own cats, before he discovered what has ever since been of such benefit to all breeders of animals …