Love truth, but pardon error.
Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Men are respectable only as they respect.
Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.
Property is organized robbery.
Friendship is the next Pleasure we may hope for: And where we find it not at home, or have no home to find it in, we may seek it abroad. It is an Union of Spirits, a Marriage of Hearts, and the Bond thereof Vertue.
In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning.
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.
The memory of a day like today reminds me to hold the ones I love that much tighter, that much longer… Take that much more time to be present and to feel the blessing of another day…
Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.
God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?
