Revolutions go not backward.
Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.
The soul’s emphasis is always right.
Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.
Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.
Try, try, try, and keep on trying is the rule that must be followed to become an expert in anything.
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.
