A mind stretched by a new ideanever shrinks back to its original proportions. ~
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self: “The work is done.”
An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it.
The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions.
If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders – you err – I mean to have some good out of being old.
Thou oh my country hast thy foolish ways Too apt to purr at every stranger’s praise.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be ‘consistent’.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be “consistent.”
What a blessed thing it is that nature when she invented manufactured and patented her audiors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
Nature when she invented manufactured and patented her authors contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
Most persons have died before they expired – died to all earthly longings so that the last breath is only as it were the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.
Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
The longing for certainty … is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.
The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
A sense of wrongdoing is an enhancement of pleasure.
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
The life of the law has not been logic it has been experience.
Faith as an intellectual state is self-reliance.
Faith implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater.
The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.
The man who thinks his wife his baby his house his horse his dog and himself severely unequalled is almost sure to be a good-humored person.
Grateful for the blessing lent of simple tastes and mind content!
Friendship is the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell him.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of we have a special face for each friend.
Life is an end in itself and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
One unquestioned text we read All doubt beyond all fear above Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed Can burn or blot it: God is Love.
Life is a romantic business but you have to make the romance.
Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.
A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
Youth fades love droops the leaves of friendship fall A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.
Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.
A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
This is a court of law young man not a court of justice.
Law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Lawyers spend a great deal of time shovelling smoke.
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
The reward of a general is not a bigger tent – but command.
Life is action and passion therefore it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself as against the saints who deny it.
Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness.
A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.
So long as the body is affected through the mind no audacious device even of the most manifestly dishonest character can fail of producing occasional good to those who yield to it an implicit or even a partial faith.
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
I should like to see any kind of a man distinguishable from a gorilla that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
The great thing in this world is not so much where we are but in what direction we are moving.
A day’s impact is better than a month of dead pull.
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime but spare the right-it holds my golden time!
Realize life as an end in itself. Functioning is all there is.
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
For me at least there came moments when faith wavered. But there is the great lesson and the great triumph: keep the fire burning until by and by out of the mass of sordid details there comes some result.
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye the more light you pour upon it the more it will contract.
I hate being placed on committees. They are always having meetings at which half are absent and the rest late.
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
A minister is coming down every generation nearer and nearer to the common level of the useful citizen – no oracle at all but a man of more than average moral instincts who if he knows anything knows how little he knows.
Men are idolaters and want something to look at and kiss and hug or throw themselves down before they always did they always will and if you don’t make it of wood you must make it of words.
Apology – a desperate habit and one that is rarely cured.
A sick man that gets talking about himself a woman that gets talking about her baby and an author that begins reading out of his own book never know when to stop.
The secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God.
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
Speak clearly if you speak at all Carve every word before you let it fall.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars nor its great scholars great men.
The reward of the general is not a bigger tent but command.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms.
Talking is like playing on the harp there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow I look back.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Take your needle my child and work at your pattern it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like embroidery.
Rough work iconoclasm but the only way to get at the truth.
We must think things not words or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand if we are to keep to the real and the true.
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
I like children; I like ’em, and I respect ’em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.
Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions – adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
Young man, the secret of my success is that at early age I discovered that I was not God.
There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
The greatest act of faith is when a man understands he is not God.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.
Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old they grow old because they quit playing.
Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.