We have more than we use.
Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.
Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.
Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.
Never learn to do anything. If you don’t learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.
Property is organized robbery.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.
I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
