All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character...
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to b...
Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.
We like that a sentence should read as if its author had he held a plough instead of a pen could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
Water is the only drink for a wise man.
Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.
When a dog runs at you whistle for him.
Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulders...
I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.
I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathem...
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.