"The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul.""
"I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap."
"A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide."
"Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them."
"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
"We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing."
"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size."
"He has half the deed done who has made a beginning."
"Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other."
"Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend."
"Stupidity often saves a man from going mad."
"A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time."
"Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall."
"Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light."
"I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn."
"Apology is only egotism wrong side out."
"Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing."
"Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end."
"How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!"
"The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer."
"Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness."
"Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden."
"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked."
"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up."
"Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out."
"It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living."
"Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us."
"It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in."
"Don't be "consistent" but be simple true."
"Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth."
"To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor."
"Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel."
"Beware how you take away hope from another human being."
"Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection."
"Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool."
"People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism."
"Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse."
"The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think."
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."
"Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason."
"The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence."
"Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!"
"Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."
"Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force."
"Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air."
"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."
"Old age is fifteen years older than I am."
"I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!"
"A new untruth is better than an old truth."
"People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'."
"The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books."
"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
"Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise."
"Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming"."
"Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking."
"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."
"The Amen of nature is always a flower."
"Have the courage to act instead of react."
"Love prefers twilight to daylight."
"Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant."
"A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times."
"The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort."
"The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn."
"Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else."
"Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children."
"Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks."
"Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?"
"Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good."
"Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned."
"If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."
"Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families."
"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."
"The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions."
"Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing."
"Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become."
"When in doubt, do it."
"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor."
"A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend."
"The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men."
"The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live."
"The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius."
"Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve."
"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."
