Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least not to express them.
The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.
Deep-seated preferences cannot be argued about - you cannot argue a man into liking a glass of beer.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
Apologizing - a very desperate habit - one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it around. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.
It's a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power. The prize of the general is not a bigger tent, but command.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week.
Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.
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.
I despise making the most of one's time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible.
Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
Poverty comes pleading not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.
From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
There was never an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.
The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.
Go on, fair Science; soon to thee Shall Nature yield her idle boast; Her vulgar lingers formed a tree, But thou hast trained it to a post.
Reason means truth and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday the sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
To brag little, to lose well, / To crow gently if in luck, / To pay up, to own up, / To shut up if beaten, / Are the virtues of a sportingman.
The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.