Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb’d in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.
Success is not the position where you are standing, but the direction in which you are going.
And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold; But friendship is the rose, with sweets in every fold.
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
To know is not less than to feel.
Young feller, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a Southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.
It’s a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends.
There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young!