A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining but they make them artificial.
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat men to whom a crises which intimidates and paralyzes the majority comes as graceful and beloved as a...
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, h...
Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the refle...
The years teach much the days never know.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prospe...
Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.
God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings and with each therefore a new idea new inventions and new applications.
A person seldom falls sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die.
Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.
The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.
Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors and a misfit from the start.