Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

To me a saint is a severely edited sinner. That's what I think.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

I don't want stuff that's compromising to me as a person, but as long as it has a pathway to redemption and has meaning, there's something solid in that in terms of the way I experience it.

There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

I take it to be from the greatest extremes, both in virtue and in vice, that the uniformly virtuous and reformed in life can derive the greatest and most salutary truths and impressions.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

Sometimes you have to be very bad before you can be very good.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

I am not what I ought to be! Ah! how imperfect and deficient! - I am not what I wish to be! I 'abhor what is evil,' and I would 'cleave to what is good!' - I am not what I hope to be! Soon, soon, I shall put off mortality: and with mortality all sin and imperfection! Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was - a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the Apostle, and acknowledge; By the grace of God, I am what I am!

A saint is a sinner who never gave up.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

In the matter of learning, the difference between the earnest and the careless student stands out clearly. The same holds true in the mastering of passion and the weaknesses to which our nature is subject, as in the acquiring of virtue.

I too have my own demons, and I have struggled. I've made my own mistakes, and I'm not proud of them.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

The formation of one's character ought to be everyone's chief aim.

I'd prefer to be good, but I'm not always. I struggle.

We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.