Clothes don’t make the man, but they make all of him except his hands and face during business hours, and that’s a pretty considerable area of the human animal.
There are two unpardonable sins in this world – success and failure.
Never threaten, because a threat is a promise to pay that it isn’t always convenient to meet, but if you don’t make it good it hurts your credit. Save a threat till you’re ready to act, and then you won’t need it.
Some men are like oak leaves – they don’t know when they’re dead, but still hang right on; and there are others who let go before anything has really touched them.
Doing the same thing in the same way year after year is like eating a quail a day for thirty days. Along toward the middle of the month a fellow begins to long for a broiled crow or a slice of cold dog.
There’s a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery.
Colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them.
When I was a kid I respected authority, then as a teenager I gave none; in middle age I expected it; now in old age I live by the word.
Science is our century’s art.
Boldness is a crucial element of genius.
A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.
Oh, the ignorance of us upon whom Providence did not sufficiently smile to permit us to be born in New England.
Be moderate in everything, including moderation.
Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.
Fear is an acid which is pumped into one’s atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to energy and all growth.
If we are wise, we never leave school.
Optimism can be prescribed and applied as a medicine, and is a remedy in proportion to its purity and the wisdom displayed in its use.
The man who goes afoot, prepared to camp anywhere and in any weather, is the most independent fellow on earth.
It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy.
In the school of the woods, there is no graduation day.