An index is a great leveller.
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.
He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left to him owes to his father’s care.
Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
I am stronger than my fear.
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
Enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think.
Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.
If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
