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.
If wine tells truth – and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!
Blood is a destiny. One’s genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.
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.