Shayne Mcclendon

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

The laws of each are convertible into the laws of any other.

I constantly ask myself if what I’m doing is for me or somebody else. It’s tripping me out!

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.