Those who trust us educate us.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job.
No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.
The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.
It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
