Always play like an underdog.
If happiness is what you’re after, you’re gonna be let down frequently and you’re gonna be unhappy much of your time. Joy though, joy is the feeling that we have doing what we are fashioned to do, no matter the outcome.
The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
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.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
Wherever you are, be there totally.
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.
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.
