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.
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.