A man cannot learn to be wise any more than he can learn to be handsome.
Men who have much to say use the fewest words.
Everybody in this world wants watching, but nobody more than ourselves.
The highest philosophers, in explaining the mystery of this world, are obliged to call in the aid of another.
Friendship is like earthenware, once broken, it can be mended; love is like a mirror, once broken that ends it.
Genuine laughing is the vent of the soul, the nostrils of the heart, and just as necessary for health and happiness as spring water is for a trout.
The hardest thing any man can do is to fall down on the ice when it’s slippery, and get up and praise the Lord.
Shame is the dying embers of virtue.
Rumor is like bees; the more you fight them the more you don’t get rid of them.
Rumor is a vagrant without a home, and lives upon what it can pick up.
If you do not know how to lie, cheat, and steal, turn your attention to politics and learn.
Peace is the soft and holy shadow that virtue casts.
We should make virtue our master, not our servant.
The unfortunate do not pity the unfortunate.
Opinions should be formed with great caution, and changed with greater.
Wisdom that don’t make us happier ain’t worth plowing for.
Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.
Put an Englishman into the garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blasted concern; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage; put an Irishman in, and he would want to boss the thing; put a Dutchman in, and he would proceed to plant it.
One legged chickens, I know, are the least apt to scratch a garden.
I hold that a man has as much right to spell a word as it is pronounced as he has to pronounce it the way it ain’t spelled.