Children are all foreigners.
Nature hates calculators.
A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
In the long run you hit only what you aim at. Therefore, though you should fail immediately, you had better aim at something high.
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.
Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
Self-realization is effortless. What you are trying to find is what you already are.
Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, It would be to use the phrase f**k off’ much more frequently.
Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice.
