We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.
Blame is safer than praise.
It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.
The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot.
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected
Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness – an open and noble temper.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
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