Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.
General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.
Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.
My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
Certitude is not the test of certainty.
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
Systems die; instincts remain.
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Men are tattooed with their special beliefs like so many South Sea Islanders; but a real human heart with divine love in it beats with the same glow under all the patterns of all earth’s thousand tribes.
I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.
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.