Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.
I despise making the most of one’s time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences.
A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
Carve every word before you let it fall.
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
Apologizing – a very desperate habit – one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.