You youngsters nowadays think you’re to begin with living well and working easy; you’ve no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!
To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.
It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.
Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
Where Jack isn’t safe, Tom’s in danger.
O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.
The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.
There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.
It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
Souls live on in perpetual echoes.
Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.
It is not true that a man’s intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
The fact is, both callers and work thicken – the former sadly interfering with the latter.
One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.
It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.