He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
Suspicion is most often useless pain.
Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
The more experiments you make the better.
As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…
Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.
Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Moral of the Work. In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill.
Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
