New arts destroy the old.
Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.
All promise outruns performance.
Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.
The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Every man believes that he has greater possibilities.
Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.
There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means; draw it all out, and hold him to it.
Hurricanes are named after people, baby, and I hope you know that falling in love with me will be so much more treacherous than boarding up the windows and waiting for me to pass.
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
The studious class are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption –pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.
When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.
