To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.
He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it.
The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it.
What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.
God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.
Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.
Winter is the night of vegetation.
Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself, – like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.
Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff’s pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.
The highest excellence is seldom attained in more than one vocation. The roads leading to distinction in separate pursuits diverge, and the nearer we approach the one, the farther we recede from the other.
The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.
We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.
Dishonest people conceal their faults from themselves as well as others, honest people know and confess them.
He half retrieves a defeat who yields to it gracefully.
Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.
Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.
Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.
All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.
Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!