For knowledge itself is power.
Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.
Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
The mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.
Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.
By indignities men come to dignities.
Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.
How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
Events tend to recur in cycles…
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
A wise man makes what he learns his own, the other shows he is but a copy or a collection at most.
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.
The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.
Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.
Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
