Tear thyself from delay.
The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.
Clogged with yesterday’s excess, the body drags the mind down with it.
He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.
Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?
Justice though moving with tardy pace, has seldom failed to overtake the wicked in their flight.
It is your business when the wall next door catches fire.
Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
You know you’re a success when you look at your kids and realize they turned out better than you.
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?
What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
One cause, which is not always observed, of the insufficiency of riches, is that they very seldom make their owner rich.
Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.
Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are the richest.
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.
Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.
