Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.
To speak and act truth with constancy and precision is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as meretorious, as to speak it under intimidation or penalty.
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.
When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.
No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.