BEAUTIFUL AND INSPIRING ABRAHAM LINCOLN QUOTES(2022)
1) ”Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
2) ”Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”
3) ”I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
4) ”Let us at all times remember that all American citizens are brothers of a common country, and should dwell together in the bonds of fraternal feeling.”
5) ”In law it is a good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not.”
6) ”Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief — resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.”
7) ”I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.”
8) ”In very truth he was, the noblest work of God—an honest man.”
9) ”The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”
10) ”I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”
11) ”My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
12) ”I do the very best I know how–the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”
13) ”I will prepare and someday my chance will come.”
14) ”Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
15) ”Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
16) ”I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”
18) ”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
19) ”In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”
20) ”I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”
21) ”Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time.”
22) ”Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.”
23) ”On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self evident lie.”
24) ”The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
25) ”If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already.”
26) ”There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
27) ”Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.”
28) ”We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
29) ”I can make a General in five minutes but a good horse is hard to replace.”
30) ”Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”
31) ”Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
32) ”When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
33) ”If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.”
34) ”Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”
35) ”Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.”
36) ”I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.”
37) ”Whatever you are, be a good one.”
38) ”I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”
39) ”I never encourage deceit, and falsehood, especially if you have got a bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have. The fact is truth is your truest friend, no matter what the circumstances are.”
40) ”I distrust the wisdom if not the sincerity of friends who would hold my hands while my enemies stab me.”
41) ”Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
42) ”What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”
43) ”The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man’s course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.”
44) ”Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser–in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.”
45) ”I cannot make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization.”
46) ”The ballot is stronger than the bullet.”
47) ”Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
48) ”I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.”
49) ”This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it.”
50) ”Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.”
52) ”It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
53) ”No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading principle–the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”
54) ”I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.”
55) ”All I ask for the negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.”
56) ”The one victory we can ever call complete will be that one which proclaims that there is not one slave or one drunkard on the face of God’s green earth.”
57) ”You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”
58) ”In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
59) ”I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, God bless the women of America!
60) ”A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
61) ”Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
62) ”The United States government must not undertake to run the Churches. When an individual, in the Church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest he must be checked.”
63) ”Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
64) ”I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
65) ”The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party – and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.”
66) ”In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book.”
67) ”With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
68) ”As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
69) ”This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
70) ”The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.”
71) ”I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain.”
72) ”I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses while crossing streams.”
73) ”I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.”
74) ”I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
75) ”Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
76) ”What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.”
77) ”Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.”
78) ”And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.”
79) ”I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”
80) ”The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
81) ”I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.”
82) ”I have a congenital aversion to failure.”
83) ”I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”
84) ”Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other thing.”
85) ”I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”
86) ”I would rather be a little nobody, then to be an evil somebody.”
87) ”Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
88) ”If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”
