Ralph Marston

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.