Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.
The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we’re saying.
Many married couples separate because they quarrel incessantly, but just as many separate because they were never honest enough or courageous enough to quarrel when they should have.
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Almost every man looks more so in a belted trench coat.
There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.
Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.
When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.
The beauty of ‘spacing’ children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones – which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
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.’