Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
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.