Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.
The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother – which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.
A loser says that’s the way it’s always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
The best combination of parents consists of a father who is gentle beneath his firmness, and a mother who is firm beneath her gentleness.
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.’
Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress.
Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.
History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.
Why do most Americans look up to education and down upon educated people?
No one should pay attention to a man delivering a lecture or a sermon on his “philosophy of life” until we know exactly how he treats his wife, his children, his neighbors, his friends, his subordinates and his enemies.
Law is order in liberty, and without order liberty is social chaos.
People decline invitations when they are “indisposed” physically, and I wish they would do likewise when they feel indisposed emotionally. A person has no more right to attend a party with a head full of venom than with a throat full of virus.
Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.
Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.
Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ‘Why not?’ and the other, ‘Why bother?’
The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light – and the next tunnel.