Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.
The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Can you really explain to a fish what it’s like to walk on land? One day on land is worth a thousand years of talking about it, and one day running a business has exactly the same kind of value.
Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.
For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws.
Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.
It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
The natural law of inertia: Matter will remain at rest or continue in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force.
Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
