I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.
If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Never do wrong when people are looking.
It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.
Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.
Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.
