Beauty rests on necessities.
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.
And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.
Our own life has to be our message.
When the desire ain’t on me I don’t need help. When it is on me I don’t want any. See? Like the old fellah that never mended his roof. Said on a wet day he couldn’t do it and on a dry day it was as good as anybody’s.
Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.
To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.
Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes a short cut to everything.
Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
