I wish my school days could have dragged on a little longer, or that I could go back and do it later in life.
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.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
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!
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. Its my job.
I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.
Gentlemen, to the lady without whom I should never have survived for eighty, nor sixty, nor yet thirty years. Her smile has been my lyric, her understanding, the rhythm of the stanza. She has been the spring wherefrom I have drawn the power to write the words. She is the poem of my life.
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideasthat the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!
Omar Khayyam
You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
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