A day for toil, an hour for sport, but for a friend is life too short.
A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.
Society is a hospital of incurables.
If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
The next best thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.
There is also 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.
There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.
Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.
That man is idle who can do something better.
It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.
Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.
Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
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