Society and the World

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.

For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone.

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.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

A noble aim, Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed, In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Humility is often only a feigned submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride.

You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones. You desire to erect a very high building? Think first of the foundation of humility.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

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

To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself.

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.

Habit, n . A shackle for the free.

Ability is not something to be saved, like money, in the hope that you can draw interest on it. The interest comes from the spending. Unused ability, like unused muscles, will atrophy.