Society and the World

The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.

It proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

We work to become, not to acquire.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing. It’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.

Never give in—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—except to convictions of honor and good sense.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.