This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.
The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.
Old books, you know well, are books of the world's youth, and new books are the fruits of its age.
The most foolish kind of a book is a kind of leaky boat on the sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
Speak not too well of one who scarce will know himself transfigured in its roseate glow; Say kindly of him what is, chiefly, true, remembering always he belongs to you; Deal with him as a truant, if you will, But claim him, keep him, call him brother still!
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped past him.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say: meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it, and had better be on speaking terms with it.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Man has will, but woman has her way.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
The older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if it has common sense on the ground floor.
Nothing is so commonplace has the wish to be remarkable.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be consistent.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
... the hydrostatic paradox of controversy. Don't you know what that means? Well, I will tell you. You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it.
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.
And when you stick on conversation's burrs, don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!
Copyrighted © 2021 — Quotation.io. All rights reserved.
