If you can eat sawdust without butter, you can be a success in the law.
Be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out.
Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving.
To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it, and thus to know anything you must know all.
Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He’ll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.
Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.
If wine tells truth – and so have said the wise, It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!
Blood is a destiny. One’s genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry.
Old age is like an opium dream. Nothing seems real except the unreal.
It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference “the president” refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
There is one gratification an old author can afford a certain class of critics; that namely, of comparing him as he is with what he was. It is a pleasure to mediocrity to have its superiors brought within range.
Most people have died before they expire; died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.
To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.
The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.
Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.
A person of genius should marry a person of character.
I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.
Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.