An index is a great leveller.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.
Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.
There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.
It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!
He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.
At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, It would be to use the phrase f**k off’ much more frequently.
All colors will agree in the dark.
