I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.
Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.
Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.
The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…
It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.
A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.
Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.
