To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.
Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.
But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.
Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than what we suspect of what we think.
On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy – I don’t disparage envy, but I don’t accept it as legitimately my master.
I despise making the most of one’s time. Half of the pleasures of life consist of the opportunities one has neglected.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.
To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one’s own moral aesthetic preferences.