Syllables govern the world.
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
The greatest gift is the ability to forget – to forget the bad things and focus on the good.
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone.
Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.
Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?
It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.
Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.
Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.
