Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
How slow and still the time did drag along.
But it warn’t no time to be sentimentering.
I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time is come I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.
Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience – 4000 critics.
We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.
We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blesses facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! – incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all – the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork.
Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood.
We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.
All gods are better than their reputation.
Man proposes, but God blocks the game.
If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries – and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, “As unhappy as God.”
No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God – primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.