For knowledge itself is power.
The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
Friends are thieves of time.
I would live to study, and not study to live.
If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.
Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.
It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.
The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.
