A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.
Men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.
Carve every word before you let it fall.
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.
But the moment you turn a corner you see another straight stretch ahead and there comes some further challenge to your ambition.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to.
Apologizing – a very desperate habit – one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Imitation is a necessity of human nature.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb’d in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past, and man forgot.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.
Success is not the position where you are standing, but the direction in which you are going.
And silence, like a poultice, comes To heal the blows of sound.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Eloquence may set fire to reason.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.