A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.
The major sin is the sin of being born.
Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
It is tact that is golden, not silence.
I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism – better dead than dying.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing.