Being is the great explainer.
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
There is no remedy for love than to love more.
Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.
To hold a pen is to be at war.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.
A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.
If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.
Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
