Mysteries are due to secrecy.
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.
I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.
Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.
Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.
Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.
The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.
Sometimes if I see negative things it really doesn’t faze me, because you’ve got to be tough and you’ve got to be you.
You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.
Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.
Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.
It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
