Youth is wasted on the young.
The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
Syllables govern the world.
Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
I want to be free; to escape. I use my pen as oars; the paper as my boat. I fill these pages to keep me afloat. I ride the waves of turmoil, so I can paddle away to calmer seas.
Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely.
I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.
Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.
The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.
