New arts destroy the old.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.
Be an opener of doors.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
We are wiser than we know.
Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
What I mean is you make the world less ugly just by living in it.
When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
It’s not the adversity, but how you face it.
If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.
Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.
Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
The luster of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue.
