Others

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

I like to have a man’s knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.

We give advice by the bucket but take it by the grain.

We are never so generous as when giving advice.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

You don’t need to take a person’s advice to make him feel good—just ask for it.