Reality is a sliding door.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.
Justice though moving with tardy pace, has seldom failed to overtake the wicked in their flight.
You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people
Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
It isn’t making mistakes that’s critical; it’s correcting them and getting on with the principal task.
A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.
Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
You don’t create things, you discover things.
A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.
