Be an opener of doors.
The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.
Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.
Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.
Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.
If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…
Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.
When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.
We have more than we use.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.
If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
