Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.
In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food of different kinds at short intervals. If young, it will eat anything at any hour of the day or night.
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.
Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity.
The mark of a civilized man is his willingness to re-examine his most cherished beliefs.
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, as money. A man’s learning dies with him, as does his virtues fade out of remembrance, but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live and keep his memory green.
A man’s opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.
The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.
Research and writing are lonely occupations. It is easy to become discouraged in solitary confinement.
It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.
I should like to see any kind of man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
Reason may be the lever, but sentiment gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the world.
If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.
Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He’ll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.
Blood is a destiny. One’s genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.