Nature hates calculators.
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.
Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.
By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.
Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can call me, and is entitled to my love and service.
Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
We all really basically have a lot of magic it’s only those of us that choose to accept it that really understand it.
