If wine tells truth – and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!
Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.
It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference “the president” refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range.
Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.
A person of genius should marry a person of character.
I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.
Lord, bid war’s trumpet cease; Fold the whole earth in peace.
There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
Pretty much all law consists in forbidding men to do something that they want to do.