Logic is like the sword
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
People sleep, and when they die they wake.
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends… Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.
A great man is always willing to be little.
We run to win, not just to be in the race.
A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
