Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.
We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.
Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
All the great ages have been ages of belief.
To find yourself, think for yourself.
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
To solve a problem or to reach a goal, you don’t need to know all the answers in advance. But you must have a clear idea of the problem or the goal you want to reach.
Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.
Clever tyrants are never punished.
Not to be provok’d is best: But if mov’d, never correct till the Fume is spent; For every Stroke our Fury strikes, is sure to hit our selves at last.
Knowledge is the treasure, but judgment is the treasurer of the one who is wise.
How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.
Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.
I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.
Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
Our faith comes in moments… yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.
