Top 72 Alger Quotes

#1. The most terrible of all things is terror.

William Rounseville Alger

#2. Cunning is the dwarf of wisdom.

William Rounseville Alger

#3. The candidate was required to prepare himself by confession, fasting, and passing the night in prayer.

Horatio Alger

#4. In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed.

Alger Hiss

#5. No period of my life has been one of such unmixed happiness as the four years which have been spent within college walls.

Horatio Alger

#6. Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read; I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.

Karen Abbott

#7. Laws are the silent assessors of God.

William Rounseville Alger

#8. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past.

Vijay Iyer

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

William Rounseville Alger

#10. Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).

Rick Perlstein

#11. How inexplicable and enviable, never to want to be anywhere other than where you already are.

Cristina Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#13. What is the highest secret to victory and peace? To will what God wills, and strike a league with destiny.

William R. Alger

#14. 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.

William Rounseville Alger

#15. A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

William R. Alger

#16. Proverbs are mental gems gathered in the diamond fields of the mind.

William R. Alger

#17. Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard.

Alger Hiss

#18. Public opinion is a second conscience.

William R. Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#20. I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.'

Karen Abbott

#21. Every man is his own greatest dupe.

William Rounseville Alger

#22. Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.

William Rounseville Alger

#23. The devil may be bullied, but not the Deity.

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#26. The oat is the Horatio Alger of cereals, which progressed, if not from rags to riches, at least from weed to health food.

Waverley Root

#27. God hands gifts to some, whispers them to others.

William Rounseville Alger

#28. To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it.

William R. Alger

#29. The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

Horatio Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#31. After every storm the sun will smile; for every problem there is a solution, and the soul's indefeasible duty is to be of good cheer.

William R. Alger

#32. Keep your working power at its maximum.

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#34. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

Hunter S. Thompson

#35. 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.

William Rounseville Alger

#36. Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

William R. Alger

#37. James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.

Jon Landau

#38. Heart's-ease is a flower which blooms from the grave of desire.

William Rounseville Alger

#39. The heart must glow before the tongue can gild.

William Rounseville Alger

#40. The fierce ambitions of Carver Dana Andrews, son of a Baptist preacher, might well have been imagined by Horatio Alger, Jr.
or Samuel Goldwyn
but not the hidden costs behind those achievements. Carl Rollyson compassionately captures the man behind the movie star.

Marion Meade

#41. There are many boys, and men too, who, like Micky Maguire, have never had a fair chance in life. Let us remember that, when we judge them, and not be too hasty to condemn.

Horatio Alger Jr.

#42. False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

William R. Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#44. The greatest strength you can have is to know your own strengths. You've got to figure out what you're good at and make the most of it.

Cristina Alger

#45. I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.

Alger Hiss

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

William Rounseville Alger

#47. 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.

William Rounseville Alger

#48. For all my wanderings, I'm ordinary. I came to terms long ago with my littleness. A man is what he is--he can't rise so much as an inch above his shortcomings--Horatio Alger be damned!

Norman Lock

#49. Words of love, are works of love.

William R. Alger

#50. Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

William R. Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#52. 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.

William Rounseville Alger

#53. How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God!

William Rounseville Alger

#54. Nemesis is one of God's handmaids.

William Rounseville Alger

#55. [democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up,

David Frum

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

William Rounseville Alger

#57. The God of merely traditional believers is the great Absentee of the universe.

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#60. Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

Horatio Alger

#61. A sigh can shatter a castle in the air.

William Rounseville Alger

#62. The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

William R. Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#64. 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.

William Rounseville Alger

#65. He who has no wish to be happier is the happiest of men.

William R. Alger

#66. Tears are the tribute of humanity to its destiny.

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

#68. You're perfect. To me you are. You always will be. When you're small you think that about your parents. When you're old, you think that about your kids. You'll see.

Cristina Alger

#69. Polite beggary is too common.

William Rounseville Alger

#70. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books.

Ernest Hemingway,

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

William Rounseville Alger

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

William Rounseville Alger

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