Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.
What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn’t it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.
Warm summer sun, shine kindly here.
Pessimist: The optimist who didn’t arrive.
A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists.
There is nothing that saps one’s confidence as the knowing how to do a thing.
I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory.
Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side.
When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.
Children have but little charity for one another’s defects.
Sometimes people do get hurt.
Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.
If the Christians of America could be persuaded to vote God and a clean ticket, it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.
There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.