We are prisoners of ideas.
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.
Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world.
We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves…
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
Wherever work is done, victory is attained.
Kings are not born they are made by universal hallucination.
Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.
When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
