Live, let live, and help live
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.
We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…
As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
New arts destroy the old.
Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown.
In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.
I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases
Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.
Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.
Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
