Others

An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash— the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

An ignorance of means may minister To greatness, but an ignorance of aims Makes it impossible to be great at all.

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Happiness . . . is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

O, well it has been said, that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak!

It is a great ability to be able to conceal one’s ability.

Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as "the pretty Miss So and So." My aunt rebuked me by saying "Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty."

If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.

The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.

Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.

He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.

Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.

Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.